War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

God knows, but He's waiting

To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

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.

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.

He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.

Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution of that will by others.