War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

But influence in the world is a capital, which must be carefully guarded if it is not to disappear.

“If every one would only fight for his own convictions, there'd be no war,” he said.

“Never, never marry, my dear fellow; that's my advice to you; don't marry till you have faced the fact that you have done all you're capable of doing, and till you cease to love the woman you have chosen, till you see her plainly, or else you will make a cruel mistake that can never be set right. Marry when you're old and good for nothing…Or else everything good and lofty in you will be done for. It will all be frittered away over trifles.

“God grant that you never know what it is to be left a widow, with no one to support you, and a son whom you love to distraction. One learns how to do anything,” she said with some pride. “My lawsuit trained me to it. If I want to see one of these great people, I write a note: ‘Princess so-and-so wishes to see so-and-so,' and I go myself in a hired cab two or three times—four, if need

“Here in Moscow we are more interested in dinner parties and scandal than in politics,” he said in his self-possessed, sarcastic tone. “I know nothing and think nothing about it. Moscow's more engrossed in scandal than anything,” he went on.

He used to maintain that human vices all sprang from only two sources—idleness and superstition, and that there were but two virtues—energy and intelligence.

Since the great thing for enabling one to get through work is regularity, he had carried regularity in his manner of life to the highest point of exactitude.

“How happy and at peace I should be, if I could say now, ‘Lord, have mercy on me!…' But to whom am I to say that? Either a Power infinite, inconceivable, to which I cannot appeal, which I cannot even put into words, the great whole, or nothing,” he said to himself, “or that God, who has been sewn up here in this locket by Marie? There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important!”