“He had suddenly felt that wealth, and power, and life - all that people arrange and preserve with such care - all this, if it is worth anything, is only so because of the pleasure with which one can abandon it all. It was that feeling on account of which a volunteer recruit drinks up his last kopeck, a man on a drunken binge smashes mirrors and windows without any apparent reason and knowing it will cost him his last penny; that feeling on account of which a man does (in the banal sense) insane things, as if testing his personal power and strength, claiming the presence of a higher judgement over life, which stands outside human conventions.”
Book:War and Peace
