War & Peace (TV Series)

The Road to Life (1973)

Anthony Hopkins: Pierre Bezukhov

Quotes 

• Natasha Rostova : Did you think they were going to shoot you?

  Pierre Bezukhov : Oh, yes.

  Natasha Rostova : It must have been awful.

  Pierre Bezukhov : Well, it was certainly no entertainment.

• Pierre Bezukhov : So, I tried so many things. Freemasonry, philanthropy, dissipation. I talked to so many people who seemed to know the answers, and none of it proved lasting. And you know from whom I finally learned the answer? It was a peasant. He was a man so close to nature that he was part of it. And his name was Platon Karatayev. And I shall remember him for the rest of my life.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Ah, but you'll never understand what I learned from that simple, illiterate man. He knew that life is the day-to-day living of it, that we are part of life itself. And that, once we begin to think about it too much, or begin to tamper with it, we create for ourselves unhappiness.

• Princess Maria Bolkonskya : Such savagery! What you've been through!

  Pierre Bezukhov : Well, it's curious, you know. It sounds awful, and in its way it was awful, but in another way, I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Anyway, it's all over now.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Oh, what fools we all are. We do things we don't intend, we say things that we don't mean, and, uh... we don't say things that we should say.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Well, you know, for a long time I've been searching for a way to live, for a philosophy that would make some sense of my life, and so I stumbled this way and that way, looking for this or that secret of life. Little did I know that I'd find it through suffering.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Because we are not to blame, you and I or Maria, for wanting to live, because that is life, the living of it. And once we forget that, we extinguish some small part of it. And that is a mortal sin.

• Pierre Bezukhov : Why should he, so full of life, why should he die like that?

  Princess Maria Bolkonskya : Because God wills it.

  Natasha Rostova : Why? Why should he will such a thing?

  Princess Maria Bolkonskya : Natasha, how can you ask that?

  Natasha Rostova : Well, I do. Why?

  Pierre Bezukhov : Well, who knows? I only know that such losses would be impossible to bear if we didn't believe it.

• Pierre Bezukhov : We cling for dear life to the comforts that we know. And once they are moved out of our customary ruts, we think that all is over for us, but...

  Natasha Rostova : Yes, I know what you mean. It's only then that the good and the new can begin again, isn't it?