From the novel “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett

“Love? What is love?” he thought. “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because I love. All is, all exists only because I love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God, and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was wanting in them; there was something one-sided and personal, something intellectual; they were not self-evident. And there was uneasiness, too, and obscurity. He fell asleep.”

“Now he had learnt to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything; and naturally therefore, in order to see it, to revel in its contemplation, he flung aside the telescope through which he had hitherto been gazing over men’s heads, and looked joyfully at the ever changing, ever grand, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked at it, the calmer and happier he was. The terrible question that had shattered all his intellectual edifices in old days, the question: What for? Had no existence for him now. To that question, What for? he had now always ready in his soul the simple answer: Because there is a God, that God without whom not one hair of a man’s head falls.”

“Prince Andrey was conscious in Natasha of a special world, utterly remote from him, brimful of joys unknown to him, that strange world, which even in the avenue at Otradnoe, and on that moonlight night at the window had tantalized him. Now that no longer tantalized him, it seemed no longer an alien world; but he himself was stepping into it, and finding new pleasures in it.
After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey’s request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had not dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions?… For his hopes for the future?… Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing.
As soon as Natasha had finished singing, she went up to him, and asked how he liked her voice. She asked this, and was abashed after saying it, conscious that she should not have asked such a question. He smiled, looked at her, and said he liked her singing, as he liked everything she did.
It was late in the evening when Prince Andrey left the Rostovs’. He went to bed from the habit of going to bed, but soon saw that he could not sleep. He lighted a candle and sat up in bed; then got up, then lay down again, not in the least wearied by his sleeplessness: he felt a new joy in his soul, as though he had come out of a stuffy room into the open daylight. It never occurred to him that he was in love with this little Rostov girl. He was not thinking about her. He only pictured her to himself, and the whole of life rose before him in a new light as he did so. “Why do I struggle? Why am I troubled in this narrow cramped routine, when life, all life, with all its joys lies open before me?” he said to himself. And for the first time for a very long while, he began making happy plans for the future. He made up his mind that he ought to look after his son’s education, to find a tutor, and entrust the child to him. Then he ought to retire from the army, and go abroad, see England Switzerland, Italy. “I must take advantage of my liberty, while I feel so much youth and strength in me,” he told himself. “Pierre was right in saying that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let us leave the dead to bury the dead; but while one is living, one must live and be happy.” he thought.”

“Such were Pierre’s reflections, and all this universal deception recognized by all, used as he was to seeing it, was always astounding him, as though it were something new. “I understand this deceit and tangle of cross purposes,” he thought, “but how am I to tell them all I understand? I have tried and always found that they understood it as I did, at the bottom of their hearts, but were only trying not to see it. So I suppose it must be so! But me – what refuge is there for me?” thought Pierre.”

“What’s this? Am I falling? My legs are giving weigh under me,” he thought and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the French soldiers with the artillerymen was ending, and eager to know whether the red-haired artilleryman was killed or not, whether the cannons had been taken or saved. But he saw nothing of all that. Above him there was nothing but the sky – the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds creeping quietly over it. “How quietly, peacefully, and triumphantly, and not like us running, shouting and fighting, not like the Frenchman and artilleryman dragging the mop from one another with frightened and frantic faces, how differently are those clouds creeping over that lofty, limitless sky. How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! All is vanity, all is a cheat, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing but that. But even that is not, there is nothing but peace and stillness. And thank God!…”

Miscellaneous:

“Politics is what a man does in order to conceal what he is and what he himself does not know.”

-Karl Kraus

“Music is a calm moonlit night, a rustling of summer foliage. Music is the distant peal of bells at eventide. Music is born only in the heart and appeals only to the heart. It is love. And the sister of music is poetry. A composer’s music should reflect the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books that have influenced him, the pictures he loves.”

-Sergei Rachmaninoff

“I have loved a ghost, and in loving a ghost my inmost self has itself become spectral… my most profound feelings have remained always solitary and I have found in human things no companionship. The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me then even the human beings I love best, and I am confident that human affection is to me at bottom an attempt to escape from the vain search for God.”

-Bertrand Russell

“The academic psychologist is perfectly free to dismiss the phenomenon of emotion or the concept of the unconscious (or both) from his consideration. Yet they remain facts to which the medical psychologist at least has to pay due attention; for emotional conflicts and the intervention of the unconscious are the classical features of his science. If he treats a patient at all, he comes up against these irrationalities as hard facts, irrespective of his ability to formulate them in intellectual terms. It is, therefore, quite natural that people who have not had the medical psychologist’s experience find it difficult to follow what happens when psychology ceases to be a tranquil pursuit for the scientist in his laboratory and becomes an active part of the adventure of real life. Target practice on a shooting range is far from the battlefield; the doctor has to deal with casualties in a genuine war. He must concern himself with psychic realities, even if he cannot embody them in scientific definitions. That is why no textbook can teach psychology; one learns only by actual experience.”

-Carl Jung

“I should like to use this opportunity to send you warm personal regards and to thank you for many a pleasant hour which I had in reading your works. It is always amusing for me to observe that even those who do not believe in your theories find it so difficult to resist your ideas that they use your terminology in their thoughts and speech when they are off guard.”

-Albert Einstein to Sigmund Freud

“You know to perceive something is an astonishing experience. I don’t know if you have ever really perceived anything – if you have every perceived a flower or a face or the sky or the sea. Of course, you see things as you pass by in a bus or a car; but I wonder whether you have ever taken the trouble to look at a flower? And when you do look at a flower, what happens? You immediately name the flower, you are concerned with what species it belongs to, or you say, “What lovely colors it has. I would like to grow it in my garden; I would like to give it to my wife, or put it in my button hole,” and so on. In other words, the moment you look at a flower, your mind begins chattering about it; therefore you never perceive the flower. You perceive something only when the mind is silent, when there is no chattering of any kind. If you can look at the evening star over the sea without a movement of the mind, then you really perceive the extraordinary beauty of it; and when you experience beauty, do you not also experience the state of love? Surely, beauty and love are the same. Without love there is no beauty without beauty there is no love. Beauty is in form, beauty is in speech, beauty is in conduct. If there is no love, conduct is empty; it is merely the product of society. of a particular culture, and what is produced is mechanical, lifeless. But when the mind perceives without the slightest flutter, then it is capable of looking into the depth of itself; and such perception is really timeless.

-Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

 

From the autobiography of Carl Jung: “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”

“We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material, we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science. How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from the outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. “

“I have also realized that one must accept the thoughts that go on within oneself of their own accord as part of one’s reality. The categories of true and false are, of course, always present; but because they are not binding they take second place. The presence of thoughts is more important than our subjective judgment of them. But neither must these judgments be suppressed, for they also are existent thoughts which are part of our wholeness.”

In any case we stand in need of a reorientation. Touching evil brings with it the grave peril of succumbing to it. We must, therefore, no longer succumb to anything at all, not even to good. A so-called good to which we succumb losses its ethical character. Not that there is anything bad in it on that score, but to have succumbed to it may breed trouble. Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute opposites. The criterion of ethical action can no longer consist in the simple view that good has the force of a categorical imperative, while so-called evil can resolutely be shunned. Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativises the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole. In practical terms, this means that good and evil are no longer a judgment. In view of the fallibility of all human judgment, we cannot believe that we will always judge rightly. We might so easily be the victims of misjudgment. The ethical problem is affected by this principle only to the extent that we become somewhat uncertain about moral evaluations. Nevertheless we have to make ethical decisions. The relativity of good and evil by no means signifies that these categories are invalid, or do not exist. Moral judgment is always present and carries with it characteristic psychological consequences. I have pointed out many times that as in the past, so in the future the wrong we have done, thought, or intended, will wreak its vengeance on our souls. Only the contents of judgment are subject to the differing conditions of time and place and, therefore, take correspondingly different forms. For moral evaluation is always founded upon the apparent certitudes of a moral code which pretends to know precisely what is good and what evil. But once we know how uncertain the foundation is, ethical decision becomes a subjective, creative act.”

“Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, and clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long ago separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.”

“It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal… A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong to this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world from the beginning has been infinite and ungraspable.”

 

From the novel “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman:

“He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost child-like in the power and simplicity of their thinking.”

“She seemed she wanted to destroy something new that had arisen between them, something it was already too late to destroy.”

“In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good; they then seek to carry this good back into life, hoping to make life itself accord with their inner image of good. But life never changes to accord with an image of good; instead it is the image of good that sinks into the mire of life – to lose its universality, to split into fragments and be exploited by the needs of the day. People are wrong to see life as a struggle between good and evil. Those who most wish for the good of humanity are unable to diminish evil by one jot.”

“The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside of people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite, and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.”

“Novikov strode back to his jeep. His face looked harsh and grim, as though it had absorbed some of the raw darkness of this November dawn.”

“I’ve been granted a great happiness,” said Novikov in a thick drawling voice. The greatest of all happinesses.” He took a photograph out of his pocket and passed it to Darensky. Darensky looked at it for a long time. “Yes, she’s a real beauty.”“Beauty?” said Novikov. “Who cares about beauty? No one could love a woman like I do just for her beauty.”

“Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”

 

From the novel, “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak:

“The fashion nowadays is all for groups and societies of every sort. It is always a sign of mediocrity in people when they herd together, whether their group loyalty is to Solovyev, Kant, or Marx. The truth is only sought by individuals, and they break with those who do not love it enough. How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.”

‘How wonderful to be alive he thought.’ ‘But why does it always have to be so painful? God exists, of course. But if he exists, then I am He.’

“But all the time life, always one and the same, always incomprehensibly keeping its identity, fills the universe and is renewed at every moment in innumerable combinations and metamorphoses. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you have risen already- you rose from the dead when you were born and didn’t notice it. Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words. what will happen to your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let’s see? To try consciously to go to sleep is a sure way to have insomnia, to try to be conscious of one’s own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a beam of light directed outwards, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don’t trip up. It’s like the headlamps on a railway engine- if you turned the beam inwards there would be a catastrophe.So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else’s. Well, what are you? That’s the crux of the matter. Let’s try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? – No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity- in the work of your hands, your family, in other people. And now look. You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life. – Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? This will be you – the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.And now one last point. There is nothing to worry about. There is no death. Death is not our department. But you mentioned talent – that’s different, that’s ours, that’s at our disposal. And to be gifted in the widest and highest sense is to be gifted for life.”

“So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task which can be achieved by physical effort and which brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky. And it isn’t a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies, are not put down on paper but forgotten. The town hermit, whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco, doesn’t know the strongest drug of all- good health and real need.”