Quotes from "War and Peace"

"Moscow meanwhile was empty. ... It was as deserted as a dying, queenless hive is deserted.
"In a queenless hive there is no life left. Yet at a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives.
"In the hot rays of the Midday sun the bees soar as gaily around the queenless hive as around other living hives; from a distance it smells of honey like the rest, and bees fly into and out of it just the same. Yet one has but to watch it a little to see that there is no life in the hive....
"So was Moscow deserted, as Napoleon, weary, uneasy and frowning paced up and down at the Kamerkolenzhsky wall..." (p. 815-817: a three page extended simile describing every aspect of the dying hive)

"A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child dreads bees, and says the object of the bee is to sting people. A poet admires the bee, sipping honey from the cup of the flower, and says the object of the bee is to sip the nectar of the flower. A beekeeper, noticing that the bee gathers pollen and brings it to the hive, says that the objet of the bee is to gather honey. Another beekeeper ... says that the object of the bee is the perpetuation of its race. The botanist observes that the bee flying with the pollen fertilises the pistil, and in this he sees the object of the bee. Another, watching the hybridisation of plants, sees that the bee contributes to that end also, and he may say that the bee's object is that. But the final aim of the bee is not exhausted by one or another, or a third aim, which the human intellect is capable of discovering. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of such aims, the more obvious it becomes that the final aim is beyond its reach.
"All that is within the reach of man is the observation of the analogy of the life of the bee with other manifestations of life. And the same is true with the final amis of historical persons and of nations." (p. 1060-1061)

"Just as it is difficult to explain why the ants hurry back to a scattered ant-hill, some dragging away from it bits of refuse, eggs, and corpses, while others run back again, and what is their object in crowding together, overtaking one another, fighting with each other, so it would be hard to give the reasons that induced the Russians, after the departure of the French, to flock back to the place which had been known as Moscow." (p. 1034)

"To a flock of sheep the sheep who is every evening driven by the shepherd into a special pen to feed, and becomes twice as fat as the rest, must seem to be a genius. And the circumstance that every evening that sheep does not come into the common fold, but into a special pen full of oats, and that that same sheep grows fat and is killed for mutton, must present itself to the minds of the other sheep as a singular conjunction of genius with a whole series of exceptional chances." (p. 1055)

"The Frenchman is conceited from supposing himself mentally and physically to be inordinately fascinating both to men and to women. An Englishman is conceited on the ground of being a citizen of the best-constituted state in the world, and also because he as an Englishman always knows what is the correct thing to do, and knows that everything that he, as an Englishman, does do is indisputably the correct thing. An Italian is conceited from being excitable and easily forgetting himself and other people. A Russian is conceited precisely because he knows nothing and cares to know nothing, since he does not believe it possible to know anything fully. A conceited German is the worst of them all... for he imagines that he possesses the truth in a science of his own invention, which is to him absolute truth." (p. 596-597)