Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Also, I think women really come into their own in their 30s.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

Life is about growth. People are not perfect when they're 21 years old.

Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one's best, then at very least one's most authentic self. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 47 and 53 years old.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

You get to a certain age and you can't judge yourself on your dad or your parents.

Between 21-30 women go through humungous changes. After that, they've generally achieved what they wanted, and they're more settled.

There is no age better than another. The commitment to give of yourself and the knowledge that the time is right are what's important.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

Self-understanding rather than self-condemnation is the way to inner peace and mature conscience.

As you age, you have this vast cauldron of experience to draw from. Some of the experiences are great; some of them you wish you'd never had. But all of them shape the work that you do and the person you become. It's just inevitable.

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

I'm not that tough; I'm not that smart. I need life telling me who I am, showing me my mind constantly. I wouldn't see it in a cave.

I'd never want to go back to being in my twenties or thirties. I was lost and confused and uncomfortable in my own skin.

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

I look back at my twenties and see that I was much less confident.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

I feel there's something about becoming a character that helps people understand themselves.

There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.

I am so far more secure and more grounded and more know who I am than when I was in my 20s.