In these times it would be hard to live without faith (War and Peace)

War is the most arduous subordination of man’s freedom to the law of God.

“But I imagine that having espoused the true faith, I cannot be bound by any obligation imposed on me by a false religion.”

Ah, that’s exactly what I say! I don’t understand it; I simply do not understand why men can’t get along without war.

Never, never marry, my friend! That is my advice to you: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of doing, and till you have ceased loving the woman you have chosen and see her clearly, or you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when are old and no longer good for anything, otherwise…

It was rumored that Savary had been sent with overtures of peace to propose a meeting between Emperor Alexandr and Napoleon. To the joy and pride of the whole army, this personal interview was refused, and instead of the Sovereign, prince Dolgorukov, the victor at wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate with Napoleon, in the event that these negotiation, contrary to expectation, proved to be actuated by a genuine desire for peace    

“Where is the tsar? Where Kutuzov?” Rostov kept asking everyone he could stop, but from no one could he get an answer

“For the last time I say to you: turn all your attention upon yourself, bridle your senses, and seek blessedness not in passion but in your heart… The source of blessedness is not without but within us…”

“… everyone lives in his own ways: you lived for yourself and say you nearly ruined your life, and found hapyness only when you began to live for others. But my experience has been exactly the reverse. I lived for glory. And, after all, what is glory but the same love for others, a desire to do something for them, a desire for them approval? So I lived for others, and not almost, but entirely ruined my life. And only since I started living for myself have I been at peace. (…) my son, sister and father, that’s the same as myself – they are not others”

“If there is God and future life, there is truth and there is goodness, and a man’s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on this scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there in the whole.”

Password: Napolion, France, bravoure’; Aleksandr, Russie, grandeur’

Every man lives for himself, using him freedom to attain his own ends, and feels in his whole being that he can at any moment perform or abstain from performing this or that action, but as soon as he has performed it, that action executed at a given moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predetermined significance.

“The military class is the most highly honored. And what is war, what required for success in warfare, what are the moral standards of the military world? The aim of war is murder; the implement of warfare – espionage, treachery, and the inducements thereto, the ruination of a country’s inhabitants by ravage and robbery to provision the army, the trickery and deceit known as military stratagems; the ethics of the military class – lack of freedom, in other words, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. Yet in spite of all this, it is the higher class, respected by all.”

The Russian were drawn up in serried ranks behind the knoll and village of Semyonovsk, their guns booming incessantly and feeling the air with smoke all along the line. It was no longer a battle: it was a protracted slaughter, futile for both the French and the Russians.

Life is everything. Life is god. Everything changes and moves and that movement is god. And while there is life there is a jot in the consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love god. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one’s suffering, in underserved suffering.

…In these times it would be hard to live without faith

No, you cannot understand what I learned from that illiterate man – that simple creature.

… do you know Natasha Rostova?  - I heard about that affair of hers at the time, a great pity

he did not repeat to himself with sickening shame the the word he had spoken, or say: “Oh, why did I not say that?” and “what ever made me say: ‘Je vous aime’?” now, on the contrary, he repeated in imagination every word that he or Natasha had say, pictured every aspect of her face and smile, and did not wish to omit or add anything, but only to repeat it again. There was not a shadow of doubt in his mind as to whether what he had entered upon was right or wrong. Only one terrible doubt sometimes crossed his mind: “wasn’t it all a dream? Wasn’t princess Marya mistaken? Am I not too conceited and self-confident? I believe in it – but what if princess Marya tells her and she smiles and says: ‘how strange! He certain is deluding himself. Doesn’t he realize that he is just a man, an ordinary mortal, while I – I am something entirely different, a being of a higher order?’”