War and Peace (Modern Library)

by Leo Tolstoy

"Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot but know? Why speak, when words cannot express what one feels?"

All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by Him who lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself was God.

Sorrow, it seems, is our common lot, my dear, tender friend Julie.

Religion, and religion alone, can—I will not say comfort us—but save us from despair.

Religion alone can explain to us what without its help man cannot comprehend: why, for what cause, kind and noble beings able to find happiness in life—not merely harming no one but necessary to the happiness of others—are called away to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, or such as are a burden to themselves and to others, are left living.

not a single hair of our heads will fall without His will.

To Pierre all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in governmental affairs. "Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it's all the same—only to save oneself from it as best one can," thought Pierre. "Only not to see it, that dreadful it!"

"There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy," she said to Boris, repeating word for word a passage she had copied from a book. "It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation."

Aliment de poison d'une ame trop sensible, Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible, Tendre melancholie, ah, viens me consoler, Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite, Et mele une douceur secrete A ces pleurs que je sens couler.

"All will be forgiven her, for she loved much; and all will be forgiven him, for he enjoyed much."

"After all, you must understand that besides your pleasure there is such a thing as other people's happiness and peace, and that you are ruining a whole life for the sake of amusing yourself! Amuse yourself with women like my wife—with them you are within your rights, for they know what you want of them. They are armed against you by the same experience of debauchery; but to promise a maid to marry her… to deceive, to kidnap… . Don't you understand that it is as mean as beating an old man or a child?…

Pierre has become the wisest character and the way this character has developed is truly breathtaking.

judge a man who is in disfavor and to throw on him all the blame of other men's mistakes is very easy, but I maintain that if anything good has been accomplished in this reign it was done by him, by him alone."

"Well, it doesn't matter," said Prince Andrew. "Tell Countess Rostova that she was and is perfectly free and that I wish her all that is good."

Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.

Napoleon was in that state of irritability in which a man has to talk, talk, and talk, merely to convince himself that he is in the right.

for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine—not

There was no joy in life, yet life was passing.

When she did not understand, it was sweeter still to think that the wish to understand everything is pride, that it is impossible to understand all, that it is only necessary to believe and to commit oneself to God, whom she felt guiding her soul at those moments.

When he listened to, or himself took part in, trivial conversations, when he read or heard of human baseness or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and did not ask himself why men struggled so about these things when all is so transient and incomprehensible—but he remembered her as he had last seen her, and all his doubts vanished—not because she had answered the questions that had haunted him, but because his conception of her transferred him instantly to another, a brighter, realm of spiritual activity in which no one could be justified or guilty—a realm of beauty and love which it was worth living for.

the French army in 1812 is clear to us now. No one will deny that that cause was, on the one hand, its advance into the heart of Russia late in the season without any preparation for a winter campaign and, on the other, the character given to the war by the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe this aroused among the Russian people. But no one at the time foresaw (what now seems so evident) that this was the only way an army of eight hundred thousand men—the best in the world and led by the best general—could be destroyed in conflict with a raw army of half its numerical strength, and led by inexperienced commanders as the Russian army was.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however it may end there will always be people to say: "I said then that it would be so," quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures many were to quite the contrary effect.

For the people who like saying "I told you so".

And Princess Mary uttered aloud the caressing word he had said to her on the day of his death. "Dear-est!" she repeated,

*happy crying noises*

Tout vient a point a celui qui sait attendre.

For that, storming and attacking but patience and time are wanted.

Dans le doute, mon cher," he paused, "abstiens-toi"

the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.

"Qui s'excuse s'accuse,"

He now experienced a glad consciousness that everything that constitutes men's happiness—the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself—is rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with something…

He was not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for; the fact of sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.

The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone.

"Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much.

"I not only understood her, but it was just that inner, spiritual force, that sincerity, that frankness of soul—that very soul of hers which seemed to be fettered by her body—it was that soul I loved in her… loved so strongly and happily… " and

either Ney, Davout, or Murat, much less Napoleon. They did not fear getting into trouble for not fulfilling orders or for acting on their own initiative, for in battle what is at stake is what is dearest to man—his own life—and it sometimes seems that safety lies in running back, sometimes in running forward; and these men who were right in the heat of the battle acted according to the mood of the moment.

By long years of military experience he knew, and with the wisdom of age understood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power.

If you have seen amiss, sir, do not allow yourself to say what you don't know!

"But isn't it all the same now?" thought he. "And what will be there, and what has there been here? Why was I so reluctant to part with life? There was something in this life I did not and do not understand."

"Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those who hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on earth and which Princess Mary taught me and I did not understand—that is what made me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me had I lived. But now it is too late. I know it!"

Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements.

every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man. Whenever I look at my watch and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church; but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten, I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the position of the hands of the watch. Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and see the valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to conclude that the whistling and the turning of wheels are the cause of the movement of the engine.

People accustomed to think in that way forget, or do not know, the inevitable conditions which always limit the activities of any commander in chief.

Andrew Savostyanov's

And as it always happens in contests of cunning that a stupid person gets the better of cleverer ones, Helene- having realized that the main object of all these words and all this trouble was, after converting her to Catholicism, to obtain money from her for Jesuit institutions

There were only thoughts clearly expressed in words, thoughts that someone was uttering or that he himself was formulating.

The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden.

Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing [Pierre went on thinking, or hearing, in his dream] is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. To unite all?"

"No, not to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but to harness all these thoughts together is what we need! Yes, one must...

This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski.

I am in shock on how the events have unfolded. I feel immense gloominess seeing the plight of Pierre, Andrew, Mary, Kutuzov and Natasha. With a length as this book, characters take up a parmanent place in the mind and collective suffering projects into the mind of the reader.

Pierre had first experienced this strange and fascinating feeling at the Sloboda Palace, when he had suddenly felt that wealth, power, and life—all that men so painstakingly acquire and guard—if it has any worth has so only by reason the joy with which it can all be renounced.

"But all that is only life's setting, the real thing is love- love! Am I not right, Monsieur Pierre?"

He said that in all his life he had loved and still loved only one woman, and that she could never be his.