War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

“Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?” said Anna Pávlovna.

Unwell

“If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,” he said. “And that would be splendid,” said

There would be no war if everyone fought only for his convixtion

“Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It

Marry when you are old & good for nothing

Even in the best, most friendly and simplest relations of life, praise and commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary to wheels that they may run smoothly.

Praise is the grease of life

He used to say that there are only two sources of human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity and intelligence. He himself undertook his daughter’s education, and to develop these two cardinal virtues in her gave her lessons in algebra and geometry till she was twenty, and arranged her life so that her whole time was occupied. He was himself always occupied: writing his memoirs, solving problems in higher mathematics, turning snuff-boxes on a lathe, working in the garden, or superintending the building that was always going on at his estate. As regularity is a prime condition facilitating activity, regularity in his household was carried to the highest point of exactitude. He always came to table under precisely the same conditions, and not only at the same hour but at the same minute.

two sins & two virtues

“No? She is very nice and kind, and above all she’s much to be pitied. She has no one, no one. To tell the truth, I don’t need her, and she’s even in my way. You know I always was a savage, and now am even more so. I like being alone . . . Father likes her very much. She and Michael Ivánovich are the two people to whom he is always gentle and kind, because he has been a benefactor to them both. As Sterne says: ‘We don’t love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.’ Father took her when she was homeless after losing her own father. She is very good-natured, and my father likes her way of reading. She reads to him in the evenings and reads splendidly.”

We like people whom we have done good

waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the far away blue mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests veiled in mist to their summits . . . There was peace and happiness . . .”I should wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there,” thought Rostóv. “In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness; but here . . . groans, suffering, fear, and this uncertainty and hurry . . . There—they are shouting again, and again are all running back somewhere, and I shall run with them, and it, death, is here above me and around . . . Another instant and I shall never again see the sun, this water, that gorge! . . .” At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds and other stretchers came into view before Rostóv. And the fear of death and of the stretchers, and love of the sun and of life,

War & peace titke explained

hearers—who like himself had often heard stories of attacks and had formed a definite idea of what an attack was and were expecting to hear just such a story—they would either not have believed him or, still worse, would have thought that Rostóv was himself to blame since what generally happens to the narrators of cavalry attacks had not happened to him. He could not tell them simply that everyone went at a trot, and that he fell off his horse and sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could from a Frenchman into the wood. Besides, to tell everything as it really happened it would have been necessary to make an effort of will to tell only what happened. It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely capable of it. His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his sabre had tasted flesh, and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he told them all that.

Young unconsciously tell th lies of their exploits

“Yes we know that, but the harm I am conscious of in myself is something I cannot inflict on others,” said Prince Andrew, growing more and more animated and evidently wishing to express his new outlook to Pierre. He spoke in French. “I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.”

Illness and remorse are only two evils

“When you see my sister, Princess Mary, you’ll get on with her,” he said. “Perhaps you are right for yourself,” he added after a short pause, “but everyone lives in his own way. You lived for yourself and say you nearly ruined your life and only found happiness when you began living for others. I experienced just the reverse. I lived for glory.—And after all what is glory? The same love of others, a desire to do something for them, a desire for their approval.—So I lived for others, and not almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I have become calmer since I began to live only for myself.” “But what do you mean by living only for yourself?” asked Pierre growing excited. “What about your son, your sister, and your father?” “But that’s just the same as myself—they are not others,” explained Prince Andrew. “The others, one’s neighbours, le prochain, as you and Princess Mary call it, are the chief source of all error and evil. Le prochain—your Kiev peasants to whom you want to do good.” And he looked at Pierre with a mocking, challenging expression. He evidently wished to draw him on. “You are joking,” replied Pierre, growing more and more excited. “What error or evil can there be in my wishing to do good, and even doing a little

Working for others is the chief cause of suffering

“Come, let’s argue then,” said Prince Andrew, “You talk of schools,” he went on, crooking a finger, “education and so forth; that is, you want to raise him” (pointing to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap) “from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual needs, while it seems to me that animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and that is just what you want to deprive him of. I envy him, but you want to make him what I am, without giving him my means. Then you say, ‘lighten his toil.’ But as I see it, physical labour is as essential to him, as much a condition of his existence, as mental activity is to you or me. You can’t help thinking. I go to bed after two in the morning, thoughts come and I can’t sleep but toss about till dawn, because I think and can’t help thinking, just as he can’t help ploughing and mowing; if he didn’t he would go to the drink shop or fall ill. Just as I could not stand his terrible physical labour but should die of it in a week, so he could not stand my physical idleness, but would grow fat and die. The third thing—what else was it you talked about?” and Prince Andrew crooked a third finger. “Ah, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit, he is dying, and you come and bleed him and patch him up. He will drag about as a cripple, a burden to everybody, for another ten years. It would be far easier and simpler for him to die. Others are being born and there are plenty of them as it is. It would be different if you grudged los...

Physical labour vs mental labour