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| Leo Tolstoy |
Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace is not one of those that
can be read in a sitting. Tolstoy serves the reader four books in one novel, 1,444
pages of history, witty remarks and a remarkable understanding of the human
nature. Flipping the last page is immensely satisfying, improving to the mind
and of course, spiritually awakening. Reading through the intimidating volume,
I could not help but underline a few lines here and there. Here are a few written
in their entirety lest I water down their import.
“He spoke with such self-confidence that no one could be sure whether
his remark was very witty or very stupid”
Prince Hippoplyte
“Influence in the world…is a capital which has to be used with economy
if it is to last”
Prince Vasili
“Moreover, he could see by her manner that she was one of those
women-mostly mothers-who once having taken a notion into their heads will not
rest until they have attained the desired object, and if opposed are ready to
go on insisting day after day and hour after hour, even to the point of making
scenes. This last reflection made him waver”
Prince Vasili
on Anna Mihalovna
“In considering the action of a statesman, one has to distinguish
between what he does as a private individual and as a general or an emperor.”
Prince Andrei
on Napoleon
“It seems to me rather useless to spend time in reading what is
unintelligible and can therefore bear no good fruit. I have never been able to
understand the mania some people have for confusing their judgment by devoting
themselves to mystical books which only arouse their doubts and excite their
imaginations, giving them a bent for exaggeration utterly contrary to Christian
simplicity”
Princess Maria
writing to her friend Julie
“Without turning their heads the soldiers glanced at one another out of
the corners of their eyes, curious to see the effect on their comrades. Every
face from Denisov’s to the buglar’s, showed around lips and chins one common
expression of conflict, excitement and agitation.”
Russian army at the imminent war
“Nikolai Rostov turned away and,
as if searching for something, started to gaze into the distance…how beautiful
the sky looked, how blue and calm and deep! How brilliant and majestic was the
setting sun! How tenderly shone the distant waters of the Danube! And fairer
still were the purpling mountains stretching far away into the river, the
convent, the mysterious gorges, the pine forests veiled in mist to their
summits…O Lord God! Thou who art in heaven, save, forgive and protect me!”
Nikolai Rostov
wounded in war
“Bilibin enjoyed conversation only when it could be made elegantly
witty. In society he was always on the watch for an opportunity to say
something striking, and took part in a conversation only when this was
possible. His talk was always plentifully sprinkled with amusingly original and
polished phrases of general interest.”
Bilibin, a
Russian diplomat
“My vocation is to be happy in the happiness of others, in the
happiness of love and self-sacrifice”
Princess Maria
“Temptations to Pierre’s besetting weakness were so strong that he
could not resist them. Again, as in Petersburg, whole days, weeks and months of
his life were busily filled with parties, dinners, lunches and balls, allowing
him no time for reflection. Instead of the new life Pierre had hoped to lead,
he still lived the old one, only in different surroundings”
Pierre’s spiritual struggles
“The Bible legend says that the absence of toil-idleness-was a
circumstance of the first man’s blessed state before the fall. Fallen man, too,
retained a love of idleness but the curse still lies heavily on the human race,
and not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow but
because our moral nature is such that we are unable to be idle and at peace. A
secret voice warns us that for us idleness is a sin. If it were possible for a
man to discover a mode of existence in which he could feel that, though idle,
he was of use to the world and fulfilling his duty, he would have attained to
one facet of primeval bliss. And such a state of obligatory and unimpeachable
idleness is enjoyed by a whole section of society-the military class. It is
just this compulsory and irreproachable idleness which has always constituted,
and will constitute, the chief attraction of military service”
On the idle state of the Russian army
“Though the enemy was nearing Moscow, Moscovites were not inclined to
regard their situation with any greater degree of seriousness: on the contrary
they became even more frivolous, as is always the case with people who see a
great catastrophe approaching. At the advent of danger there are always two
voices that speak with equal force in the human heart: one very reasonable
invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the means of escaping it;
the other, with a still greater show of reason, argues that it is too
depressing to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee
everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to
shut one’s eyes to the disagreeable until it actually comes and to think
instead what is pleasant. When a man is alone he generally listens to the first
voice; in the company of his fellow-men to the second. So it was now with the
inhabitants of Moscow. It was a long time since Moscow had seen so much gaiety
as there was that year...
...There was that feeling of everything
was about to collapse, and that a sudden change was imminent, but up to the 1st
of September things still continued the same. Like a criminal being led to the
gallows, who knows that in a minute he must die but yet stares about him and
straightens the cap sitting awry on his head, so Moscow automatically carried
on with the routine of daily life, though aware that the hour of destruction
was at hand when all the conventional condititions of existence would be torn
asunder”
On Moscovites
before the invasion of Moscow by the French army led by Napoleon
“According to her understanding, the whole point of any religion was
merely to provide recognized forms of propriety as a background for the
satisfaction of human desires”
Hedonistic Hélène having converted
to Catholicism for the sole purpose of obtaining a divorce from her husband
Pierre who was in war that she may marry a young foreign prince
“There were, it is true, some rigid individuals unable to rise to the
heights of the occasion who saw in the project a desecration of sacrament of
marriage; but such people were few and far between, and they held their peace,
while the majority were interested in Helene’s happiness and which would be the
better match for her.”
Minority’s view and silence concerning Hélène’s seeking divorce
“The one thing Pierre desired now with his whole soul was to get way as
quickly from the terrible scenes through which he had lived that day and return
to ordinary conditions of life, and go to sleep quietly in his own room in his own
bed. He felt that only in the ordinary conditions of life would he be able to
understand himself and all he had seen and experienced. But such ordinary
conditions of life were nowhere to be found.”
Pierre after
witnessing the ravages of war
“Man can be master of nothing if he were afraid of death. But he who
does not fear death is lord of all. If it were not for suffering, man would not
know his limitations would not know himself.”
Pierre’s meditations
“In quite, untroubled times every administrator believes that it is
only by his efforts that the whole population under his charge is kept going;
and in this consciousness of being indispensible lies the chief reward of his
pains and exertions. So long as the calm lasts, the administrator pilot holding
on to the ship of the people with a boat-hook from his frail bark, and himself
gliding along, naturally imagining that his efforts move the ship he is
clinging to. But let a storm spring up, let the sea begin to heave and the
great vessel toss about of itself, and any such illusion becomes impossible.
The ship ride on in mighty independence, the boat-hook no longer reaches to the
moving vessel and the pilot, from being the arbiter, the source of power, finds
himself an insignificant, feeble, useless person.”
On Count Rostochpin, governor of Moscow,
upon Napoleon’s invasion of it
“When a pause occurred during his short visit Nikolai, as people do
when there are children, turned to Prince Andrei’s little son, caressing him
and asking him whether he would like to be a hussar. He took the child on his
knee, played with him and looked round at Princess Maria. With a softened,
happy, shy look she was watching the little lad she loved in the arms of the
man she loved. Nikolai caught that look, and as though he divined its
significance flushed with pleasure and fell to kissing the child with
simple-hearted gaiety.”
Blossoming love between Nikolai and
Princess Maria
“In men Rostov could not endure to see the expression of a lofty
spiritual life-he referred to it scornfully as philosophy and moonshine; but in
Princess Maria that very sorrowfulness which revealed the depth of a whole spiritual
world foreign to him was an irresistible attraction.”
On Nikolai’s Rostov’s spiritual awakening
attributed to the fairer sex-Princess Maria
“His Speech, his voice, and especially that calm, almost antagonistic
look betrayed the detachment from all earthly things which is so terrible for a
living man to witness. He plainly found it difficult to understand the concerns
of this world; yet at the same time one felt that he failed to understand, not
because he had lost the power of understanding but because he understood
something else-something the living did not and could not understand, and that
entirely absorbed him”
Prince Andrei on his deathbed
“His physical strength and agility during the first period of his
imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue or sickness
meant. Every night before going to bed he repeated: ‘O Lord, lay me down like a
stone and raise me like new bread;’ and when he got up in the morning he would
give his shoulders a certain shake and
say: ‘Lie down and curl up, get up and shake up.’…He was always busy and
only at night, allowed himself to indulge in conversation, which he loved and
singing. He sang not as a trained singer does who knows he is being listened
to, but like the birds, obviously because he was as much obliged to give vent
to those sounds as one sometimes is to stretch oneself; and his singing was
always light, sweet, plaintive, almost feminine, and his face the while was
very serious…In the eyes of the prisoner, Platon Karatayev was just an ordinary
solder like the rest of his kind…but to Pierre he always remained what he
seemed that first night-an unfathomable, rounded off, eternal personification
of the spirit of simplicity and truth”
On Platon Karatayev (one of
the most amiable characters of the novel)
“In burnt and devastated Moscow, Pierre experienced the almost extreme
limits of privation a man can endure…And it was just at this time that he
attained to the peace and content with himself for which before he had striven
in vain. He had spent long years in search for that tranquility of mind, that
inner harmony…he had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations
of society life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice, in romantic love
for Natasha; he had sought it by the path of intellectual reasoning- and all
these efforts and experiments had failed him. And now, without any thought on
his part, he had found that peace and inner harmony simply through the horrors
of death, through privation, and through what he had seen in Karatayev.”
On Pierre’s spiritual
wakening when he least expected or sought it
“And it never enters anyone’s head that to admit greatness not commensurable
with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one’s own nothingness
and immeasurable littleness. For us who have the standard of good and evil
given us by Christ, nothing can claim to be outside the law. And there is no greatness
where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.”
Tolstoy
refuting the appellation “c’est grand” given Napoleon by historians
“After the deaths in such rapid succession of her son and husband she
felt herself a being accidentally forgotten in this world. She ate and drank,
slept and lay awake, but did not live. She wanted nothing from life but peace,
and that peace only death could give her…her existence had no manifest aim but
was merely, so far as could be seen, occupied by the need to exercise her various
functions and proclivities. She had to eat, have a little sleep, ruminate and reminisce,
shed a few tears, do some handwork, lose her temper occasionally, and so forth,
simply because she had a stomach, brains, muscles, nerves and a liver.”
On
Countess Natalia Rostov
“Nikolai put down the book and looked at his wife. The radiant eyes gazed
at him questioningly: would he approve or disapprove of her diary? There could
be no doubt not only of Nikolai’s approval but also of his admiration of his
wife. Perhaps it need not be done so pedantically, Nikolai thought, perhaps it
need not be done at all; but this constant, tireless, spiritual application,
the sole aim of which was the children’s moral welfare, enchanted him. If Nikolai
could have analysed his feelings he would have found that his proud, tender,
assured love for his wife rested on this feeling of awe at her spirituality, at
the lofty moral world, almost beyond his reach, in which she had her being.”
On Nikolai upon discovering a diary that his
wife, Princess Maria, kept of their children
