“But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.”

“Prince Andrei was one of the best dancers of his day. Natasha danced exquisitely. Her little feet in their satin dancing shoes performed their role swiftly, lightly, as if they had wings, while her face was radiant and ecstatic with happiness.”

“We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.”

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”

“Do not be interested in the quantity of people who respect and admire you, but in their quality. If bad people dislike you, so much the better. —LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA”

“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”

I'm not living, I'm waiting for a solution that goes on and on being put off.”

“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down trees and driving away every beast and every bird -- spring, however, was still spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the grass, wherever it had not been scraped away, revived and showed green not only on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards but between the paving-stones as well, and the birches, the poplars and the wild cherry-trees were unfolding their sticky, fragrant leaves, and the swelling buds were bursting on the lime trees; the jackdaws, the sparrows and the pigeons were cheerfully getting their nests ready for the spring, and the flies, warmed by the sunshine, buzzed gaily along the walls. All were happy -- plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people -- adult men and women -- never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to all creatures to enjoy -- a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love. No, what they considered sacred and important were their own devices for wielding power over each other.”

“The main reason for the terrible cruelty between men today, apart from the absence religion, is still the refined complexity of life which shields people from the consequences of their actions. However cruel Attila, Genghis Khan and their followers may have been, the act of killing people personally, face to face, must have been unpleasant: the wailing relatives and the presence of the corpses. And thus their cruelty was restrained. Nowadays we kill people through such a complex process of communication, and the consequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the action.”

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

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”

“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”

“nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the disregard of [non-resistance] by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war and violence to Christians.

“It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals...”