War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

said Prince Hippolyte in a tone which showed that he only understood the meaning of his words after he had uttered them.

He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid.

he was struck by a voice coming from the shed, and its tone was so sincere that he could not but listen.

The nearer they got to the hollow the less they could see but the more they felt the nearness of the actual battlefield.

He spoke in the tone of entreaty and reproach that a carpenter uses to a gentleman who has picked up an axe: “We are used to it, but you, sir, will blister your hands.”

The commanders met with polite bows but with secret malevolence in their hearts.

Rostóv felt as in a dream that he continued to be carried forward with unnatural speed but yet stayed on the same spot.

The gloom that enveloped the army was filled with their groans, which seemed to melt into one with the darkness of the night.

He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it.

Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary, and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.

The chief pleasure and necessity of such men, when they encounter anyone who shows animation, is to flaunt their own dreary, persistent activity.

she never laughed without a sound of tears in her laughter.

All the evening Nicholas paid attention to a blue-eyed, plump, and pleasing little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials.

Then who was executing him, killing him, depriving him of life—him, Pierre, with all his memories, aspirations, hopes, and thoughts?

Who was doing this? And Pierre felt that it was no one. It was a system—a concurrence of circumstances. A system of some sort was killing him—Pierre—depriving him of life, of everything, annihilating him.

The very qualities that had been a hindrance if not actually harmful to him in the world he had lived in—his strength, his disdain for the comforts of life, his absent-mindedness and simplicity—here among these people gave him almost the status of a hero.

this silence about Dokhtúrov is the clearest testimony to his merit.

But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink—he recovered.

is a very mild expression of the contradictory replies, not meeting the questions, which all the historians give, from the compilers of memoirs and the histories of separate states to the writers of general histories and the new histories of the culture of that period.

The strangeness and absurdity of these replies arise from the fact that modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one asks.