Book detail: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This translation of Leo Tolstoy's seminal work offers a detailed portrayal of the political and social upheaval during the early 19th century in Russia.
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“At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“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.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Everything depends on upbringing.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“There are such repulsive faces in the world.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“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.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“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.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Kings are the slaves of history.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Pierre was one of those people who are strong only when they feel themselves perfectly pure.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky