what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?

Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.

All the enthusiasms of childhood and youth passed without leaving much mark on him; he succumbed to sensuality, and to vanity, and, towards the end of his schooldays, to the idea of liberalism, but always within limits which his instinct unfailingly indicated to him.

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.

Besides, to fall out of love and in love at the same time is to love twice as deeply as one did before.

For the first time I envisaged the idea that we - that is, our family - were not the only people in the world, that not every conceivable interest was centered in ourselves but that there existed another life - that of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, had no idea of our existence even. I must have known all this before but I had not known it as I did now - I had not realized it; I had not felt it.

I endeavor to recall the happy comforting dreams interrupted by my returning to consciousness of reality, but to my astonishment so soon as I recapture the thread of my former reverie I find it impossible to go on with it and, most astonishing of all, my imaginings no longer afford me any pleasure.

Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life?