And suddenly Pierre had a vision of a dream which he had at Mozhaysk, after the battle of Borodino. He had then dreamt that a voice was saying to him: “To love life is to love God. The hardest of all is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in the guiltlessness of suffering.”
And in the midst of these thoughts Pierre fell asleep.
He woke up in the dark, shivering with cold. He was dreaming that he was standing before his old teacher, who was showing him a globe. This globe was a living, quivering sphere, with no fixed dimensions. Its whole surface consisted of drops, closely cohering. And these drops were all in motion, and changing, so that now they coalesced, now they divided. Every drop was striving to expand, to absorb the drops nearest to it, but others, striving to do the same, crushed it, or were absorbed by it, or were annihilated.
“This is life,” the old teacher was saying.
“How simple and how clear,” thought Pierre. “How was it I did not know that before?”
“In the centre is God, and every drop tries to expand so as to reflect Him in the fullest measure possible. And it grows, and is absorbed and crowded out, and on the surface it is annihilated, and sinks into the depths, and again floats up to the surface. That is he, Karataev; he has been absorbed and has vanished.”
“Do you understand, my child?” said the teacher.
“Do you understand, damn you?” screamed a voice, and Pierre woke up.
"As he thinketh in his heart, so is he" - Proverbs 23:7