Ell’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

'It occurs to no one to acknowledge a greatness not commensurate with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness and immeasurable meanness... There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.'

'They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive. What, me? My immortal soul? Ha, ha...' and he laughed till tears started to his eyes ...

Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its far-away depths. 'And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I! And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!' He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside his companions.'

Holy shit... Borodino may be one of the greatest sequences ever written

'He now experienced a glad consciousness that everything that constitutes men's happiness—the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself—is rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with... With what? ... He was not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for; the fact of sacrificing itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.'

'In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them and act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary, and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.'

'The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope and light; the other half is everything where she is not, and there all is gloom and darkness...'

'You'll die and know all, or cease asking.'

'At that moment it meant nothing to him, or what was said of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him, and only wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently.'

'His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon—his hero—but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with clouds flying over it ...

'He felt ashamed; he felt that he was occupying someone else's place here beside Hélène. "This happiness is not for you," some inner voice whispered to him. "This happiness is for those who have not in them what there is in you."'