Dannykenyon’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

“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.’

‘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.’