Pierre Bezukhov Quotes

I have hundreds of roubles that I don't know what to do with, and she stands there in a tattered coat and looks at me timidly," thought Pierre. "And what does she need money for? As id this money can add one hair's breadth to her happiness, her peace of mind? Can anything in the world make her or me less subject to evil and death? Death, which will end everything and which must come today or tomorrow - in a moment, anyhow, compared with eternity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Prince Andrei recognized Wolzogen and Clausewitz, accompanied by a Cossack. They passed close by, continuing to converse, and Pierre and Andrei involuntarily heard the following phrases: "Der Krieg muss im Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht genug Preis geben,"* said one. "O ja," said the other voice. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Independence must be accompanied by a social revolution ~ Pierre Bourgault

[Science] dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. TRUTH! JUSTICE! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to depart from them and to deceive or enslave mankind to assure its happiness. ~ Pierre-Simon Laplace

Geliebten Lakaien are once again here with us. Lisa, Heddy, Henrietta, Peter, and Jean Pierre, ~ Anne Rice

There were some children round him playing in the dust on the paths. They had long fair hair, and with very earnest faces and solemn attention were making little mountains of sand so as to stamp on them and squash them underfoot.
Pierre was going through one of those gloomy days when one looks into every corner of one's soul and shakes out every crease.
'Our occupations are like the work of those kids,' he thought. Then he wondered whether after all the wisest course in life was not to beget two or three of these little useless beings and watch them grow with complacent curiosity. And he was touched by the desire to marry. You aren't so lost when you're not alone any more. At any rate you can hear somebody moving near you in times of worry and uncertainty, and it is something anyway to be able to say words of love to a woman when you are feeling down.
He began thinking about women.
His knowledge of them was very limited, as all he had had in the Latin Quarter was affairs of a fortnight or so, dropped when the month's money ran out and picked up again or replaced the following month. Yet kind, gentle, consoling creatures must exist. Hadn't his own mother brought sweet reasonableness and charm to his father's home? How he would have loved to meet a woman, a real woman!
He leaped up, determined to go and pay a little visit to Mme Rosémilly.
But he quickly sat down again. No, he didn't like that one! ~ Guy De Maupassant

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure. ~ Pierre Beaumarchais

God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them. ~ Pierre Beaumarchais

Every person whether Greek or Barbarian who is in training for wisdom, leading a blameless, irreproachable life, chooses neither to commit injustice nor return it unto others, but to avoid the company of busybodies, and hold in contempt the places where they spend their time courts, councils, marketplaces, assemblies in short, every kind of meeting or reunion of thoughtless people ... People such as these, who find their joy in virtue, celebrate a festival their whole life long. ~ Pierre Hadot

When preparing a role, I work first on the body language and physical aspects of the performance; the psychological dimension comes naturally once I'm in character. ~ Pierre Niney

No nations are more warlike than those which profess Christianity. ~ Pierre Bayle

People who share the same language, French or Chinese or whatever, have the same vocal cords and emit sounds which are basically the same, as they come from the same throats and lungs. ~ Pierre Schaeffer

I have found a very great number of exceedingly beautiful theorems. ~ Pierre De Fermat

A number of ethical, aesthetic, psychiatric or forensic classfications that are produced by the "institutional sciences",not to mention those produced and inculcated by the educational system, are similarly subordinated to social functions, although they derive their specific efficacy from their apparent neutrality. They are produced in accordance with the specific logic, and in the specific language, of relatively autonomous fields, and they combine a real dependence on the classificatory schemes of the dominant habitus (and ultimately on the social structures of which these are the product) with an apparent independence. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability -
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually - let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

If my fall made you smile, you might not want to witness what's about to happen when I get up. ~ Yvonne Pierre

*Take my advice, do like me and get yourself another lover. This is good advice, in fact it's very good advice: if you don't like it, it's not my fault.*

*Farewell my angle. I've enjoyed having you and I've no regrets leaving you. I may come back to you. That's the of the world. It's not my fault.* ~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization. ~ Pierre Schaeffer

I realized that most people waste their lives earning a living, and I wanted to live. I love painting, so I keep painting. That's how I became an artist. ~ Pierre Soulages

My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories. ~ Pierre Omidyar

What happens with sassy music is you get floated away from yourself, then snap back to reality too hard. I hate that. The only antidote is to just stay depressed. ~ D.B.C. Pierre

But try as Phoebe might to blend with her peers, it felt like bluffing, mouthing the words to a song she'd never been taught, always a beat late. At best, she fooled them. But the chance to distinguish herself, impress them in the smallest way, was lost. At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during "conversations" in French class - Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath - such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked-up someone was at a party. ~ Jennifer Egan

In this world, you must be a bit too kind to be kind enough. ~ Pierre De Marivaux

What makes eBay successful - the real value and the real power at eBay - is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace. ~ Pierre Omidyar

The books the Holy Spirit is writing are living, and every soul a volume in which the divine author makes a true revelation of his word, explaining it to every heart, unfolding it in every moment. ~ Jean-Pierre De Caussade

The Olympic Games were created for the exhaltation of the individual athlete. ~ Pierre De Coubertin

Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality. ~ Pierre Bayard

I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing. ~ Jean-Pierre Melville

At times, we are the bridge that allows another to re-enter the world after a loss. Don't mistake it for more or its beauty may be lost. ~ Danielle Pierre

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history. ~ Pierre Bayle

God speaks to all individuals through what happens to them moment by moment. ~ Jean-Pierre De Caussade

Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

With his ABC News experience, perhaps Pierre Salinger's next job could be cohosting-with Oliver Stone-a 24-hour Conspiracy Network. ~ Jonathan Alter

Those who largely rely on their hands and the beautiful or shocking traces of the imagination that they leave on the canvas ... CONCRETE ... one builds a picture. ~ Pierre Alechinsky

These days what's not worth saying gets set to music. ~ Pierre Beaumarchais

Why did I revive that old word? Because with the notion of habitus you can refer to something that is close to what is suggested by the idea of habit, while differing from it in one important respect. The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. So the term constantly reminds us that it refers to something historical, linked to individual history, and that it belongs to a genetic mode of thought, as opposed to essentialist modes of thought (like the notion of competence which is part of the Chomskian lexis). Moreover, by habitus the Scholastics also meant something like a property, a capital. And indeed, the habitus is a capital, but one which, because it is embodied, appears as innate. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself. ~ Pierre Charron

One awakens, one rises, one dresses, and one goes forth;
One returns, one dines, one sups, one retires and one sleeps. ~ Pierre-Antoine-Augustin De Piis

The next time you see Jesus Christ, ask Him what happened to the just society He promised 2,000 years ago. ~ Pierre Trudeau

It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself.
By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindividuality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged.
Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow. ~ Milan Kundera

In Naples, Fla., I met a self-made man, a multimillionaire, whose round penthouse apartment is home to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, and Mickey Mantle. He had purchased the most coveted items auctioned by the Mantle family at Madison Square Garden in December 2003. ~ Jane Leavy

Jean following close behind. The plan was for them to cover us as we entered. Getting in was easy. The door was unlocked. I went in low, clearing the first visible area. After Bear entered, I moved past the door. I had to trust that Pierre and Jean would act accordingly. A feat more difficult due to the necessary silence. We'd never worked together, but tactics were tactics, and training was training. They'd done this before. Room by room, floor by floor, we investigated the house. And we found it empty. The thought of Bashir al-Sharaa slipping out of my grasp once again gnawed at my gut. ~ L.T. Ryan

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Gaily! gaily! close our ranks! Arm! Advance! Hope of France! Gaily! gaily! closed our ranks! Onward! Onward! Gauls and Franks! ~ Pierre-Jean De Beranger

Heaven absolves all crimes committed to gain a throne Once Heaven gives it to us. ~ Pierre Corneille

I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end ... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

By doubting we are led to enquiry, and by enquiry we discern the truth. ~ Pierre Abelard

One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

God teaches the soul by pains and obstacles, not by ideas. ~ Jean-Pierre De Caussade