Quotes from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Everything I know, I know because of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Yes, love, ...but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? ...Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.... If it were only possible for me to see her once more... once, looking into those eyes to say...”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“A Frenchman's self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman's self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]

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“The Sultan tapped his tented fingers, staring into the distance. Suddenly, he lunged toward me, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me roughly down to sit on the cushion beside him. “This . . . mermaid,” he said through clenched teeth, leaning in so close to me that I could smell the mint on his breath. “The one who sang to the king at night.” His voice was fierce, but quiet. I couldn’t tell if anyone but me could hear. “How . . .” he began. “How did she think of the king . . . in her heart?”
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“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)

It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, quote from The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

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