Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)

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The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served as little as possible... and to serve others as much as possible.

Leo Tolstoy
Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

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

Leo Tolstoy
He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.

Leo Tolstoy
Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.

Leo Tolstoy
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Leo Tolstoy
Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

Leo Tolstoy
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.

Leo Tolstoy
When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!

Leo Tolstoy
"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way under me," he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the French soldiers with the artilleryman was ending, and eager to know whether the red-haired gunner artilleryman was killed or not, whether the cannons had been taken or saved. But he saw nothing of all that. Above him there was nothing but the sky — the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds creeping quietly over it.

Leo Tolstoy
Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.

Leo Tolstoy
While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth- that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together....

Leo Tolstoy
He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.

Leo Tolstoy
The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness.

Leo Tolstoy
There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...

Leo Tolstoy
The peculiar and amusing nature of those answers stems from the fact that modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.
If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement of humanity and of the peoples, the first question — in the absence of a reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible — is: what is the power that moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously replies either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was very proud, or that certain writers wrote certain books.
All that may be so and mankind is ready to agree with it, but it is not what was asked.

Leo Tolstoy
What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

Leo Tolstoy
I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

Leo Tolstoy
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

Leo Tolstoy
I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

Leo Tolstoy
The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

Leo Tolstoy
What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie, what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die—and everything will end. You will die and learn everything—or stop asking.

Leo Tolstoy
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

Leo Tolstoy
You will die — and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything — or cease asking.

Leo Tolstoy
You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

Leo Tolstoy
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. 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.

Leo Tolstoy
Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrei went up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss. And there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. "Ah, what have you done to me?" it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrei felt that something gave way in his soul and that he was guilty of a sin he could neither remedy nor forget.

Leo Tolstoy
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

Leo Tolstoy
I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.

Leo Tolstoy
War is not a courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous.

Leo Tolstoy