War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

Everyone knew very well that the lovely countess’s illness came from the inconvenience of marrying two husbands at once, and that the Italian’s treatment consisted in removing that inconvenience; but in Anna Pavlovna’s presence not only did no one dare to think about it, but it was as if no one knew it.

Michaud said resolutely, but, glancing at the sovereign, Michaud was horrified at what he had done. The sovereign began to breathe heavily and quickly, his lower lip trembled, and his beautiful blue eyes instantly became moist with tears.

The majority of the people of that time paid no attention to the general course of things, but were guided only by the personal interests of the day.

Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness.

Changed, scented, his head doused with cold water, Nikolai, somewhat late, but armed with the phrase vaut mieux tard que jamais,* arrived at the governor’s.

For the first time, all that pure, spiritual inner work, which she had so far lived by, emerged. All her inner work of discontent with herself, her suffering, her yearning for the good, obedience, love, self-sacrifice—all this now shone in those luminous eyes, in her fine smile, in every feature of her tender face.

Rostov could not bear to see an expression of higher spiritual life in men (that was why he did not like Prince Andrei), he referred to it contemptuously as philosophy, dreaminess; but in Princess Marya it was precisely in that sorrow, which revealed the whole depth of a spiritual world foreign to him, that Nikolai felt an irresistible attraction.

Pierre felt like an insignificant chip of wood fallen into the wheels of a machine unknown to him but functioning well.

In that gaze, beyond all the conventions of war and courts, human relations were established between these two men. In that one moment, they both vaguely felt a countless number of things and realized that they were both children of the human race, that they were brothers.

“Love? What is love?” he thought. “Love hinders death. Love is life. Everything, everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is connected only by that. Love is God, and to die—means that I, a part of love, return to the common and eternal source.”

Natasha and Princess Marya also wept now, but they did not weep from their own personal grief; they wept from a reverent emotion that came over their souls before the awareness of the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before them.

doing. To study the skillful maneuvers and aims of Napoleon and his army from the moment of his entry into Moscow until the destruction of that army, is the same as studying the meaning of the dying leaps and convulsions of a mortally wounded animal.

the club of a national war was raised with all its terrible and majestic power, and, not asking about anyone’s tastes or rules, with stupid simplicity, but with expediency, not sorting anything out, rose and fell, and hammered on the French until the whole invasion was destroyed.

In military action, the force of an army is also a product of mass times something, some unknown x.

He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close;

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes—is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

Pierre’s insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.

“I wanted to listen at the door, but I knew you’d tell me.”

girlhood

If that activity displeases someone, it displeases him only because it does not coincide with his limited notion of what the good is.

If we allow that human life can be governed by reason, the possibility of life is annihilated.

In renouncing knowledge of the final purpose, we will clearly understand that, just as it is impossible to invent for any plant a flower and seed that correspond to it more than those it produces, so it is impossible to invent two other persons, with all their past, who would correspond to such a degree, in such minute detail, to the purpose they were meant to fulfill.

As the sun and every atom of the ether is a sphere complete in itself and at the same time only an atom of a whole that is inaccessible to man in its enormity—so, too, every person bears his own purposes within himself and yet bears them in order to serve general purposes that are inaccessible to man.

All that is accessible to man is the observation of the correspondence between the life of a bee and other phenomena of life. It is the same for the purposes of historical figures and peoples.

Having begun farming out of necessity, he quickly developed such a passion for it that it became his favorite and almost sole occupation.

So Levin coded teehee

She felt that her bond with her husband held, not by those poetic feelings that had attracted him to her, but by something else, indefinite but firm, like the bond between her own soul and body.

Quite often, in moments of irritation, it happened that the husband and wife would spend a long time arguing; then, after the argument, Pierre, to his joy and surprise, would find not only in his wife’s words, but in her actions, the very thought she had been arguing against. And he not only found the same thought, but found it purified of whatever had been superfluous, provoked by passion and argument, in his expression of it. After seven years of married life, Pierre felt a joyful, firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt it because he saw himself reflected in his wife. In himself he felt all the good and the bad mixed together and obscuring each other. But only what was truly good was reflected in his wife; all that was not entirely good was rejected. And this reflection came not by way of logical thinking, but otherwise—as a mysterious, unmediated reflection.

“No, Pierre’s an excellent nanny,” said Natasha, “he says his hand was just made to fit a baby’s bottom. Look.”

When you stand and wait for that tightened string to snap any moment, when everybody’s waiting for the inevitable upheaval—people must join hands, as many and as closely as possible, in order to oppose the general catastrophe.

The ideas of the revolution, the general state of mind, produced the power of Napoleon. The power of Napoleon suppressed the ideas of the revolution and the general state of mind.

To find the component forces equal to a composite or resultant, it is necessary that the sum of the components equal the composite. This condition is never observed by general historians, and therefore, in order to explain the resultant force, they must necessarily allow for an unexplained force, besides the insufficient components, which acts upon the composite.

Power is the sum total of the wills of the masses, transferred by express or tacit agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

(1) What is power? (2) What force produces the movement of peoples? (1) Power is that relation of a certain person to other persons in which the person takes the less part in the action the more he expresses opinions, suppositions, and justifications for the jointly accomplished action. (2) The movement of peoples is produced, not by power, not by intellectual activity, not even by a combination of the two, as historians used to think, but by the activity of all the people taking part in the event and always joining together in such a way that those who take the greatest direct part in the event, take the least responsibility upon themselves, and vice versa.