War & Peace (TV Series)

Of Life and Death (1973)

Anthony Hopkins: Pierre Bezukhov

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Quotes 

• Pierre Bezukhov : I've never really known what my life was. I searched everywhere for it. What was I looking for? Peace of mind? Inner harmony? I tried everything: freemasonry, dissipation, philanthropy, love, romantic love... And I found nothing. Nothing. I learned nothing, to be cruel, about those ordinary soldiers hurt at the field of Borodino. Till I came here. This is the last place on earth I would have looked for it.

• Pierre Bezukhov : You can think too much about life. In a strange way this interferes with the living of it.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Well, what do you make of it all, Platon? Here's Laurent. He doesn't want to be here. He'd rather be at home in France. We don't want them here. Yet here he is, with thousands of others.

  Platon Karatayev : Well, birds fly south in the winter, and from time to time, men want to be on the move.

• Pierre Bezukhov : It's self-consciousness, you see, Platon, that ruins us. Self-consciousness. It's that consciousness of oneself that separates us from life, from the scheme of things. And also it makes us painfully aware that we're not part of them. See how that dog doesn't have self-consciousness, does it? In a way, neither do you, really.

• French Corporal : Better to be a dog at a time like this, eh?

  Pierre Bezukhov : No. No, it's better to be a man. Even at a time like this.

  French Corporal : Oh, I don't know. When he gets fed. People play with him. He doesn't know what's going on. No, no, a dog's life is better, I think.

• Pierre Bezukhov : A city will burn when it's left. It doesn't need to be set alight.

• Platon Karatayev : Of course it's different for you. You're an educated man. You can't help wanting to know everything.

  Pierre Bezukhov : I think you know more than I will ever know.

  Platon Karatayev : Oh no no, sir, that's not true.

  Pierre Bezukhov : Yes, it is, it is true.

  Platon Karatayev : I can't even speak French. I can't even read.

  Pierre Bezukhov : No. But you know your place in the scheme of things. And I don't. At least I didn't until I came here.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Doesn't it mean anything to you that a... a boy like that was shot?

  Platon Karatayev : Oh, of course, of course. But there, on the other hand... Think of death, shorten life.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Life! Life is the minute-by-minute living of it. That's all, isn't it? And loving all things.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Do you know why I stayed in Moscow?

  Platon Karatayev : No.

  Pierre Bezukhov : I stayed in Moscow to assassinate Napoleon. I worked out abstruse calculations from the apocalypse, all in order to convince myself that I was the chosen one.

  Platon Karatayev : Oh, oh, that is funny, sir, but it don't seem like you.

  Pierre Bezukhov : No, it wasn't me. Any more than freemasonry is me, or philanthropy, or any of those other self-conscious activities.