Kathryn, the_naptime_reader’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

With 12 minutes to spare I finished my year long read through of War and Peace! Feels like quite the accomplishment, because that second epilogue was brutally boring 😂

With his heart, overflowing with love he loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving.

We all think we only have to be knocked a little bit off course and we’ve lost everything, but it’s only the start of something new and good. Where there is life, there is happiness. There is a huge amount yet to come.

…he had faith…in a living God of feeling & experience. In days gone by he had sought Him by setting purposes for himself. That search for a purpose had really been a seeking after God, & suddenly during his captivity he had come to know, not through words or arguments, but from direct personal experience, Some thing that his old nurse had told him long ago: God is here, here with us now, here & everywhere.

These men, carried away by their passions, were nothing more than the blind executors of the saddest law of necessity; but they saw themselves as heroes, and mistook their doings for achievements of the highest virtue and honor.

And greatness cannot exist without simplicity, goodness and truth.

Greatness is, by their standards, a quality, enjoyed by certain exceptional creatures that go by the name of “hero “. And Napoleon, as he wraps himself up in his warm fur-coat and scurries home, leaving behind dying men who are not only his comrades, but (by his own admission) people he brought there himself, feels “he’s a great man”, and his soul is at peace.

When the elastic of historical argument is stretched to breaking point, when an action flagrantly infringes anything humanity can agree to call by the name of goodness and justice, these historians take refuge and the concept of greatness. “Greatness“ seems to exclude all quantification of right and wrong. A great man knows no wrong. There is no atrocity that could be laid at the door of a great man.

And despite a great show of caring for the army, each man was thinking only of himself, and how quickly he could get away and save his skin.

It was now that Pierre understood the full power of human vitality, and the effectiveness of our inbuilt safety device, distraction, which works like a safety-valve in steam-engines, letting off excess steam as soon as the pressure reaches a certain point.