Quotes from book

War and Peace

“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”

“Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.”

“There are such repulsive faces in the world.”

“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”

“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.”

“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”

“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…”

“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”

“There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before…”

“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”

“How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?… All will end in death, all!”

“the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"… p982”

“I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.”

“God is the same everywhere.”

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.”

“How can one be well… when one suffers morally?”

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”

“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.”

“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.”