Dannykenyon > Recent Status Updates

“‘You know that all human inventions progress from the complex to the simple and that perfection is always simplicity.’”

He… taught him to read in the great open book above our heads which is called the sky and in which God writes on the blue firmament in diamond letters.

“He… taught him to read in the great open book above our heads which is called the sky and in which God writes on the blue firmament in diamond letters.”

“He… taught him to read in the great open book above our heads which is called the sky and in which God writes on the blue firmament in diamond letters.”

“He… taught him to read in the great open book above our heads which is called the sky and in which God writes on the blue firmament in diamond letters.”

“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.”

“Oh how absurd you are! It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.”

“There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations with Willarski, with the princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, which gained for him the general goodwill. This was his acknowledgement of the impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view.”

“The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one’s needs, and consequent freedom in the choice of one’s occupation, that is, of one’s way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be indubitably man’s highest happiness.”

“we need only penetrate to the essence of any historic event—which lies in the activity of the general mass of the people who take part in it—to be convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the actions of the mass but is itself continually controlled.”

“Natasha and Princess Marya also wept now, but not because of their own personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion, which had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their presence.”

‘Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow-man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people.’

He took his seat beside the aide-de-camp on duty and drove into the suburb. ‘Moscou déserte!’ he said to himself. ‘Quel événement invraisemblable!’

‘To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our investigation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.’

Catching up on the Battle of Borodino as I whizz home from a long weekend in Milano. Tolstoy is unsubtle in showing how little he thinks of Napoleon’s ‘military genius’ and his nationalistic undercurrent is jarring in parts. Onwards to Moscow we go (or home in my case)!

‘“Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have done!” he thought, aimlessly going towards a crowd of stretcher-bearers moving from the battlefield.

But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front and especially to the left, near Semyonovsk, something seemed to be seething in the smoke…’

“‘I will tell you what to do, and what I do. Dans le doute, mon Cher,’ he paused, ‘abstiens-toi;’ he articulated the French proverb deliberately.”

“She felt in her heart a devout and tremulous awe at the thought of the punishment that overtakes men for their sins, and especially of her own sins, and she prayed to God to forgive them all, and her too, and to give them all, and her too, peace and happiness.”

‘So others are even more afraid than I am!’ He thought. ‘So that’s all there is to what is called heroism! And did I do it for my country’s sake? And how was he to blame, with his simple and blue eyes? And how frightened he was! He thought I would kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George’s Cross. I can’t make it out at all.’

“Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.”

Beginning book three, set 1812.