“Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? ...But peace I do not know, and can’t give to you. My whole being, my love...yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune...or of happiness-what happiness!...Is it impossible?"

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone.”

“To speak of it would be giving importance to something that has none.”

“But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them.”

“A man is never such an egoist as at moments of spiritual exaltation, when it seems to him that there is nothing in the world more splendid and fascinating than himself.”

“There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he sees that they are accepted by those about him.”

“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.”

“We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).”

“Does it ever happen to you," Natasha said to her brother, when they had settled in the sitting room, "does it ever happen to you that you feel there's nothing more - nothing; that everything good has already happened? And it's not really boring, but sad?" "As if it doesn't!" he said. "It's happened to me that everything's fine, everybody's merry, and it suddenly comes into my head that it's all tiresome and we all ought to die....”

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.”

“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”

“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...”

“The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.”

“Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it."