Real, and traceable to the page. In War and Peace, Book Ten, chapter XVI, the old field marshal Kutúzov is talking to Prince Andrew about the Turkish peace — “everything came at the right time” — and clinches it with a saying he delivers in French: Tout vient à point à celui qui sait attendre. The English sentence everybody quotes is the footnote Louise and Aylmer Maude hung on that French line, readable in their translation at Project Gutenberg ↗. Tolstoy wrote the scene; the Maudes wrote the wording.
“Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait” Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book Ten, ch. XVI, trans. Louise & Aylmer Maude (the English is the translators’ footnote to Kutúzov’s French). Via quotle.info
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Provenance
The footnote at the foot of the page
Work
War and Peace
Location
Book Ten (1812), chapter XVI — Kutúzov’s conversation with Prince Andrew
Translation
Louise and Aylmer Maude. The English sentence is their footnote, not body text.
Original language
Russian — but this particular line is in French in Tolstoy’s text
“Yes, I have been much blamed,” he said, “both for that war and the peace… but everything came at the right time. Tout vient à point à celui qui sait attendre. *” …
* “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.”
Book Ten, ch. XVI
The asterisk on Kutúzov’s French calls down to the translators’ note at the foot of the page; both are reproduced here exactly as they stand in the Project Gutenberg edition of the Maude translation. The speech is Tolstoy’s; the bolded English sentence is the Maudes’ gloss on it.
Searching the complete Maude text at Project Gutenberg ↗ returns this sentence exactly once in a 3.3 MB novel — and not where you would expect. It sits alone on its own line, prefixed with an asterisk, directly beneath Kutúzov’s speech. That is the shape of a translators’ footnote, and the French it glosses is a few lines above it.
Wikiquote ↗ lists the line in its sourcedWar and Peace section and places it at Bk. X, ch. 16 — the same chapter, reached independently. It carries the neighbouring maxim from the same conversation too: “The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
The Project Gutenberg bibliographic record ↗ names the translators as Louise Maude (1855–1939) and Aylmer Maude (1858–1938), and states the rights position in four words: “Public domain in the USA.”
✓Public domain
Tolstoy’s Russian original (1869) is long out of copyright, and so is this English wording. Project Gutenberg distributes only texts that are free of US copyright, and its catalogue record for this translation ↗ states plainly: “Public domain in the USA.” The same record gives the translators’ dates — Louise Maude died in 1939, Aylmer Maude in 1938.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Context
Why the footnote matters
Almost every English quotation of this line presents it as a sentence Tolstoy wrote. It is a sentence his translators wrote. Kutúzov speaks French here because that is what Russian generals and noblemen did, and the Maudes did with it what they do elsewhere in the book: left the French standing in the text and glossed it at the foot of the page. The same conversation does it again a few lines later, when Kutúzov complains that his advisers n’entendent pas de cette oreille, voilà le mal — another asterisk, another footnote.
None of which makes the quotation false. It makes it precise. The scene is Tolstoy’s, the character is Tolstoy’s, and the decision to put a patience-proverb into the mouth of the one general whose entire strategy is patience is very much Tolstoy’s point — a few lines later Kutúzov tells Prince Andrew there is nothing stronger than those two, patience and time. What is not Tolstoy’s is this specific run of English words.
The scene is Tolstoy’s. The English is the Maudes’.
Read the full story
It is worth knowing what Kutúzov is being patient about. The conversation happens in 1812, as Napoleon marches on Moscow, and Kutúzov is defending himself against the charge that he is doing nothing. His answer is that not-doing is the plan: “It is not difficult to capture a fortress but it is difficult to win a campaign. For that, not storming and attacking but patience and time are wanted.” The proverb is his defence of a strategy everyone around him thinks is cowardice.
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Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) wrote the two novels most often nominated as the greatest ever written — War and Peace and Anna Karenina — and then largely renounced fiction for a radical Christian moralism that shaped the nonviolent resistance movements of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. War and Peace is stitched through with French, the working language of the Russian aristocracy he was writing about, which is precisely why this particular line needed a translator’s footnote at all.
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Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude. Book Ten, chapter XVI (translators’ footnote). Project Gutenberg ebook no. 2600.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait’?” Last verified 11 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/everything-comes-in-time-to-him-who-knows-how-to-wait/