Dannykenyon’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

“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.

“So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not the sad memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones—those impressions of one’s distant past in which dreams and realities blend—and they laughed with quiet enjoyment.”

“The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labour—idleness—was a condition of the first man’s blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease.”

Back in the upper echelons of Russian society after the chaos of Austerlitz, Rostov is going off the rails meanwhile Pierre has found spiritual purpose via a cult. An indelible line:

“Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive—live: tomorrow you’ll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?”