Fyodor Dostoevsky (quotes)

I’m drunk but truthful.
I have a plan-to go mad.
Money is coined liberty.
Life had replaced logic.
Beauty will save the world
We are citizens of eternity.
Beauty would save the world.
If not reason, then the devil.
Hell is the inability to love.
Reason is the slave of passion.
To think too much is a disease.
Be the sun and all will see you.
Make us your slaves, but feed us.
Every man needs a place to go to.
The Russian soul is a dark place.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself.
Man is bound to lie about himself
Trifles, trifles are what matter!
Above all, do not lie to yourself.
If there is no God, then I am God.
Being in love doesn’t mean loving.
The world will be saved by beauty.
When reason fails, the devil helps!
We are all happy if we but knew it.
I am crazy about mysterious things.
Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.
One can fall in love and still hate.
I want to suffer so that I may love.
God is the pain of the fear of death
Speak of a wolf and you see his tail!
Without God all things are permitted.
I utter what you would not dare think
Right attitudes produces right action
Who doesn’t desire his fathers death?
Everything seems stupid when it fails.
If God is dead, everything is allowed.
Love life more than the meaning of it?
Everything passes, only truth remains.
You can be sincere and still be stupid.
God knows what is in me in place of me.
Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness
We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.
A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.
To live without Hope is to Cease to live.
Woe to the man who offends a small child!
The soul is healed by being with children.
Life had stepped into the place of theory.
Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.
Let us be servants in order to be leaders.
To cook your hare you must first catch it.
They won’t let me … I can’t be … good!
God knows what lives in me in place of me.
He who masters the grey everyday is a hero.
Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid.
I am too young and I’ve loved you too much.
If there is no God, everything is permitted.
Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.
Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.
Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!
A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.
But people will laugh at all sorts of things.
Life is in ourselves and not in the external.
Only through suffering can we find ourselves.
Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
With love one can live even without happiness.
The consciousness of life is higher than life.
I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.
There is no virtue if there is no immortality.
From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse.
I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!
Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
… you simply can’t imagine what men will say!
Taking a new step. . .is what people fear most.
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
If God does not exist, everything is permitted.
Realists do not fear the results of their study.
Gambling is a most foolish and imprudent pursuit.
I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.
But how could you live and have no story to tell?
And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.
Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.
Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid!
If the person laughs well, they are a good person.
Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.
Wealth is the number of things one can do without.
Hang your merit. I don’t seek anyone’s approbation.
Oh I’ve plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.
What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people.
If there were no God, he would have to be invented.
Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth.
They were like two enemies in love with one another.
I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.
If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.
The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!
Lying is a delightful thing for it leads to the truth.
Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
How good life is when one does something good and just!
I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is.
Forgive me… for my love -for ruining you with my love.
Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.
It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!
a man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing.
To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.
Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
Oh, if only I did nothing simply as a result of laziness.
Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!
This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.
I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.
The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.
Luxuries are easy to take up but very difficult to give up
a man is no example for a woman. It‚Äôs a different thing.
Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me.
Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.
It’s the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery.
Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen.
If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.
The man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
What is the use of Christ’s words, unless we set an example?
Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.
Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window
I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?
The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.
One must first learn to live oneself before one blames others.
After all, bluff and real emotion exist so easily side by side.
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.
I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn’t suffered.
I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.
To love another person is to see them as God intended them to be.
To be too conscious is an illness. A real thorough going illness.
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.
In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.
They have this social justification for every nasty thing they do!
In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.
I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man.
On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering.
I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.
The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.
Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness.
If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
…it all, maybe, most likely, indeed, might turn out for the best.
Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!
To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
A single day is sufficient for a man to discover what happiness is.
… what you need more than anything in life is a definite position.
If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.
Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.
There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.
Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.
Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!
If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all.
And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.
There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.
Happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it.
For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.
The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it.
If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.
The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?
You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.
Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.
There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time.
I’ve long stopped worrying about who invented whom – God man or man God.
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering…
It’s not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles.
In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith.
… one could never judge a man without seeing him close, for oneself …
It’s in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.
To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.
I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.
…, twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
To go wrong in one’s own way is better then to go right in someone else’s.
The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.
I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.
The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.
Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.
What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.
Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.
You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.
What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning…
Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.
Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody thinks about changing himself.
…there is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.
Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.
But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.
No, evidently habit means a lot. The devil knows what habit can do to a person.
The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.
Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!
The secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.
The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.
It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?
Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously.
We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.
There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.
It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.
I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?
I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.
Hold your tongue; you won’t understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.
When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
The degree of a nation’s civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don’t succeed, I quit!
It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.
Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then… Well, then I woke up.
A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!
In a way there’s only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.
The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.
Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.
Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself.
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.
Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man’s free will?
And if there’s love, you can do without happiness too. Even with sorrow, life is sweet.
Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.
Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms
You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.
Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then . . . Well, then I woke up.
I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.
There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.
My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.
It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave
Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.
A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.
Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.
Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.
I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus.
If he’s alive he has everything in his power! Whose fault is it he doesn’t understand that
If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s human, he’ll murder; if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive.
It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?
The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.
It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.
Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.
It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.
I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus…
originality and a feeling of one’s own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
… you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.
There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.
Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time.
Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.
To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.
The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.
I swear to you, sirs, that excessive consciousness is a disease–a genuine, absolute disease.
you don’t need free will to determine that twice two is four. that’s not what i call free will
For if there’s no everlasting God, there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it.
The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it’s even very beautiful.
Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.
I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.
Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it … one must have the courage to dare.
One must be a great man indeed to be able to hold out even against common sense.” “Or else a fool.
It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me.
Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. If anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once.
If you can put the question, ‘Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?’ then you are responsible.
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.
What is hell?…The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.
He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.
I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.
My friends, God is necessary for me if only because he is the one being who can be loved eternally.
All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.
The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
Is it really not possible to touch the gaming table without being instantly infected by superstition?
Loving someone is different from being in love with someone. You can hate someone you’re in love with
Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.
He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly.
They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.
Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous.
Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
… you are a man still young, so to say, in your first youth and so put intellect above everything …
They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.
That’s always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.
–you wouldn’t have hurt me like this for nothing. So what have I done? How have I wronged you? Tell me.
Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.
If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.
A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.
There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor
What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.
How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
It is man’s unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!
How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?
A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.
Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. ‚ÄìThe Grand Inquisitor
We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast?
Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.
I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.
At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts.
Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.
There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.
I walked along Nevsky Avenue.Actually it was more torture, humiliation, and bilious irritation than a stroll…
Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you‚Äôd think it was champagne.
But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.
For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?
Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.
Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.
Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.
Civilization merely develops man’s capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and … absolutely nothing else.
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
When . . . in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?
Yes, that’s right… love should come before logic … Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow – they don’t hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.
We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.
For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.
But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.
One man doesn’t believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!
I sometimes think love consists precisely of the voluntary gift by the loved object of the right to tyrannize over it.
Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.
Life is what matters, life alone – the continuous, eternal process of discovering life – and not the discovery itself.
One must love life before loving its meaning … yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.
The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.
For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.
Of course I shall go astray often…for who does not make mistakes? But I cannot go far wrong for I have seen the truth.
In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilt for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin.
You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won’t be wiser?
What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.
In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.
Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.
He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.
Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man … just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.
Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there – that is living.
Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.
Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
I love mankind, he said, “but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.
Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we’re alive, we’re all the same once we’re dead. Just used-up shells.
Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.
I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.
It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!
. . . finally, I couldn’t imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .
I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we’d better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
Since I wasn’t consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it.
The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.
I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we‚Äôre both unhappy, and we both suffer.
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
That’s just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating – and then he eats you up.
One circumstance tormented me then: Namely, that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am only one, and they are all.
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them ‚Äî the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.
But what are years, what are months!” he would exclaim. “Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.
If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness
It’s in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.
Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
Don’t think I’m talking nonsense because I’m drunk. I’m not a bit drunk. Brandy’s all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.
Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness
What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.
I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.
Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good.
It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.
To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.
To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.
Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.
It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
they may all be drunk at my place, but they’re all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we’ll lie our way to the truth
People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.
You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.
Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.
It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
You can’t be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.
It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated…
One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
I have been tortured with longing to believe … and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.
My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?
To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering — that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.
A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better – cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?
Don‚Äôt let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.
An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that – Count Leo Tolstoy.
And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
Let it not be a beautiful face,’ I thought, ‘but to make up for that, let it be a noble, an expressive, and, above all, an extremely intelligent one.
An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.
Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.
But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.
Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.
Eh, brother, but nature has to be corrected and guided, otherwise we’d all drown in prejudices. Without that there wouldn’t be even a single great man.
Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it’s all right if he’s bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.
In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall…
If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it in my mind. I have seen it, SEEN IT and the living image of it has filled my soul forever…
We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.
Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.
Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.
Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go, and do not be afraid.
And, indeed, I will at this point ask an idle question on my own account: which is better ‚Äî cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink…. I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!
Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.
I know that you don’t believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!
But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.
Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.
Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.
Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.
Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.
I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings of what? Of the truth , for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes , have seen it in all its glory .
A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.
.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness
Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.
Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.
Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
We don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.
The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was ‘sublime and beautiful,’the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.
…one may say anything about the history of the world – anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.
Alyosha’s heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.
My sweetheart! When I think of you, it’s as if I’m holding some healing balm to my sick soul, and although i suffer for you, i find that even suffering for you is easy.
The chief thing is to love others likeyourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted – you will find out at once how to arrange it all.
God is necessary, and therefore must exist…But I know that he does not and cannot exist…Don’t you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?
And it is so simple… The one thing is – love thy neighbor as thyself – that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.
Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.
Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.
There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.
Don‚Äôt be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don‚Äôt be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.
Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.
I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human
Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.
I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.
Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread”.
I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don’t know a thing about my illness; I’m not even sure what hurts.
Equality lies only in human moral dignity. … Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers.
To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.
if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me–even then I would have jumped!
The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.
People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people.
She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age.
Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don’t want millions, but an answer to their questions.
Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable, but desirable. They mean growth. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.
May you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?
Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions – it’s like a dream.
If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.
Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.
Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.
What matters,” said the prince at last, “is that you have a child’s trusting nature and extraordinary truthfulness. Do you know that a great deal can be forgiven you for that alone?
the most offensive is not their lying—one can always forgive lying—lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth—what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying…
If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
Whether one showed you and execution or a little finger, you would extract an equally edifying thought from both of them, and would still be content. That’s the way to get on in life.
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.
My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it’s absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.
Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?
If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you.
Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.
The most offensive is not their lying – one can always forgive lying – lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth – what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.
In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone’s brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.
Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.
Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don’t trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.
People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.
It’s a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.
Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?” Marmeladov’s question came suddenly into his mind “for every man must have somewhere to turn…
I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction — if a house is falling upon you, for instance — one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one’s eyes and wait, come what may . . .
I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.
There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.
What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.
But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.
Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.
Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery… The great thing about it is equality… Slaves are bound to be equal.
I’ve always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I’ve been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I’ve looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.
Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.
Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.
If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love
Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.
- What is a Socialist? – That’s when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no marriages, and everyone has any religion and laws he likes best. You are not old enough to understand that yet.
I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.
And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
Know that I’ve forgotten precisely nothing; but I’ve driven it all out of my head for a time, even the memories–until I’ve radically improved my circumstances. Then…then you’ll see, I’ll rise from the dead!
And you’re sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes–you’re sorry, for you didn’t even have time to fall in love…
I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays & the soft tender gentle memories that come with them…’ -Father Zossima
Humanity can live without science, it can live without bread, but it cannot live without beauty. Without beauty, there would be nothing left to do in this life. Here the secret lies. Here lies the entire story.
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.
Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.
The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.
Because I’m a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.
Now I’m living out my life in a corner, trying to console myself with the stupid, useless excuse that an intelligent man cannot turn himself into anything, that only a fool can make anything he wants out of himself.
There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery and authority.
Two and two make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies.
But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.
Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.
You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it-which is what matters most.
Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.
At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now ! I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.
Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance…. Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do…. It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.
I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I…I wanted to have the daring…and I killed her.
As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.
Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: “Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.”
If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.
I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. And it was after that that I found out the truth . I learnt the truth last November on the third of November, to be precise and I remember every instant since.
Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we…yes, I assure you…we should be begging to be under control again at once.
But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it’s for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!
You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.
I don’t understand anything…and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact…If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I’ve made up my mind to stick to the fact.
For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!
Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the ‘wee ones,’ because there are little children and big children. All people are ‘wee ones.’ And I’ll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.
At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world.
Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.
I don‚Äôt understand anything…and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact…If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I‚Äôve made up my mind to stick to the fact.
I do not wish you much happiness–it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people’s philosophy, I will simply repeat: ‘Live more’ and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.
And in fact you’re not like everyone else: you weren’t ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment.
There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?
Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street; they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.
The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.
Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.
Such power!” Adelaida cried all at once, peering greedily at the portrait over her sister’s shoulder. “Where? What power?” Lizaveta Prokofyevna asked sharply. “Such beauty has power,” Adelaida said hotly. “You can overturn the world with such beauty.
One can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan’t understand them thoroughly.
Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are.
It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn’t help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.
The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.
He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.
Let us first fulfill Christ’s injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves.
A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.
When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness,… then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift… every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.

I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you — and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!
I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can‚Äôt help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.
Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.
I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you… My precious, my darling, my dearest!
To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.
My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.
A man would still do something out of sheer perversity – he would create destruction and chaos – just to gain his point…and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point.
This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out; that you will never become a different man.
It wasn’t the New World that mattered…Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.
It’s curious and ridiculous how much the gaze of a prudish and painfully chaste man touched by love can sometimes express and that precisely at a moment when the man would of course sooner be glad to fall through the earth than to express anything with a word or a look.
…to return to their ‘native soil,’ as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.
Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.
Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.
There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one’s own, to be precisely “like other people.
I must add… my gratitude to you for the attention with which you have listened to me, for, from my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse.
in the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night.
If I seem happy to you . . . You could never say anything that would please me more. For men are made for happiness, and anyone who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.
I don’t need money, or, better, it’s not money that I need; it’s not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over!
To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
The sky was horribly dark , but one could distinctly see tattered clouds , and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star , and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea : I decided to kill myself that night .
To study the meaning of man and of life ‚Äî I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God’s help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.
A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity “on a square yard of space.
At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.
I have in my own life merely carried to the extreme that which you have never ventured to carry even halfway ; and what’s more, you’ve regarded your cowardice as prudence, and found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that, in fact, I may be even more “alive” than you are. Do take a closer look!
What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.
There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men’s sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.
Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?…No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people’s expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it–you’ll find that a bit harder.
Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.
By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.
They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.
Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.
Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today — gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon.
There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself – but you just can’t help it.
It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian ‘become an Atheist,’ but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst!
The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else – something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.
In such situations, of course, people don’t nurse their anger silently, they moan aloud; but these are not frank, straightforward moans, there is a kind of cunning malice in them, and that’s the whole point. Those very moans express the sufferer’s delectation; if he did not enjoy his moans, he wouldn’t be moaning.
… the more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person
Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.
Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment! Oh, self-satisfied people: with what proud self-satisfaction such babblers are ready to utter their pronouncements! If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn’t have the heart to teach me.
I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.
Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering… since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.
One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness – that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it cannot fit into any classification and the omission of which sends all systems and theories to the devil.
What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?
When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.
Yet, I didn’t understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently invaded; and who, until the last moment, refuse to yield out of pride and are afraid to express their own feelings to you.
I am a sick man…I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, i don’t know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine. What’s more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine.
It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who “every one” was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was.
The world says: “You have needs – satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.
It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who “every one” was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was…
The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.
The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.”
Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.
Brother, I’m not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter – this is what life is, herein lies its task.
All people seem to be divided into’ordinary’and ‘extraordinary’. The ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because?theyare ordinary.Whereas the extraordinary people have the right to commit any crime they like and transgress the law in any way just because they happen to be extraordinary.
I want peace; yes, I’d sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.
At some thoughts one stands perplexed – especially at the sight of men’s sin – and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that, once and for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.
With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, “You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You’re acting now, in spite of your ‘holy’ wrath.
Brother, I‚Äôm not depressed and haven‚Äôt lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter ‚Äì this is what life is, herein lies its task.
We’re always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can’t help feeling that that’s what it is.
The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation… …everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what’s what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.
I wanted to fathom her secrets; I wanted her to come to me and say: “I love you,” and if not that, if that was senseless insanity, then…well, what was there to care about? Did I know what I wanted? I was like one demented: all I wanted was to be near her, in the halo of her glory, in her radiance, always, for ever, all my life. I knew nothing more!
Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.
I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle , my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.
Remember, too, every day, and whenever you can, repeat to yourself, Lord, have mercy on all who appear before Thee today. For every hour and every moment thousands of men leave life on this earth, and their souls appear before God. And how many of them depart in solitude, unknown, sad, dejected that no one mourns for them or even knows whether they have lived or not!
If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.
You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one’s whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.
One can tell a child everything, anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters.
Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I’m a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what’s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble–that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.
‘Ever seen a leaf – a leaf from a tree?’ ‘Yes.’ I saw one recently – a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining …’ ‘What’s this – an allegory?’ “No; why? Not an allegory – a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything’s good.’
Coming at twenty to his father’s house, which was a very sink of filthy debauchery, he, chaste and pure as he was, simply withdrew in silence when to look on was unbearable, but without the slightest sign of contempt or condemnation. His father, who had once been in a dependent position, and so was sensitive and ready to take offense, met him at first with distrust and sullenness.
I’ve made a terrible confession to you, he concluded gloomily. Do appreciate it, gentlemen. And it’s not enough, not enough to appreciate it, you must not just appreciate it, it should also be precious to you, and if not, if this, too, goes past your souls, then it means you really do not respect me, gentlemen. I tell you that, and I will die of shame at having confessed to such men as you.
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.
By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.
Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible.
I am a wicked man… But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.
One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice-however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy-is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms… [an]will attain his object-that is, convince himself he is a man and not a piano-key!
I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote and infinite time and space, but here on Earth…I want to see with my own eyes the lamb lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been about. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer.
It is precisely that requirement of shared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords and killed one another. They have invented gods and challenged each other: “Discard your gods and worship mine or I will destroy both your gods and you!”
Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit…” –Ivan Karamazov
What tender and devoted mother wouldn’t be dismayed and ill with terror at her son’s or daughter’s stepping even one hair’s breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general’s rank is the original man – in other words, the man who won’t be quiet.
I think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.’ ‘Love life more than the meaning of it?’ ‘Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will I grasp its meaning. That’s what I’ve been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved.
You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.
There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.
And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here. Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty
You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there‚Äôs no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man‚Äôs nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.
Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate … the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.
… active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and eveyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.
Do you know I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it’s only that I’m not able to express it…And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God’s sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!
And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
Do you know I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it’s only that I’m not able to express it…And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God’s sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!…
You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love.
As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.
Pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say, ‘Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.’ Fly from that dejection, children!
Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don’t harrass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you – alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it. I laid down the largest stake allowe-four thousand gulden-and lost it. Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it on the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me.
Ah, Father! That’s words and only words! Forgive! If he’d not been run over, he’d have come home today drunk and his only shirt dirty and in rags and he’d have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been sousing and rinsing till daybreak, washing his rags and the children’s and then drying them by the window and as soon as it was daylight I should have been darning them. What’s the use of talking forgiveness! I have forgiven as it is!
Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.
I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creatures is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom […] Instead of taking men’s freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?
Love all God‚Äôs creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.
But it’s precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.
He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story — the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
No, I can’t admit it. Brother,’ said Alyosha suddenly, with flashing eyes, ‘you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could firgive? But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, “Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three…And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere!
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.
I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child’s tormentor: ‘Just art thou, O Lord!’ but I do not want to cry out with them. While there’s still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to ‘dear God’ in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!
And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive–in other words, only what is conducive to welfare–is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill–he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.
…a condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round about him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years, eternity! – rather would he live thus than die at once? Only live, live, live! – no matter how, only live!
I wanted to pray for an hour, but I keep thinking and thinking, and always sick thoughts, and my head aches – what is the use of praying? – it’s only a sin! It is strange, too, that I am not sleepy: in great, too great sorrow, after the first outbursts one is always sleepy. Men condemned to death, they say, sleep very soundly on the last night. And so it must be, it si the law of nature, otherwise their strength would not hold out… I lay down on the sofa but I did not sleep…
Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet, tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age: I bless the sun’s rising each day and my heart sings to it as before, but now I love its setting even more, its long slanting rays, and with them quiet, mild, tender memories, dear images from the whole of a long and blessed life–and over all is God’s truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!
For example, I’m terribly proud. I’m as mistrustful and as sensitive as a hunchback or a dwarf; but, in truth, I’ve experienced some moments when if someone had slapped my face, I might even have been grateful for it. I’m being serious. I probably would have been able to derive a peculiar sort of pleasure from it-the pleasure of despair, naturally, but the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when you’re very acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament.
Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts.
I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.
I did not understand that she was hiding her feelings under irony, that this is usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded, and that their pride makes them refuse to surrender till the last moment and shrink from giving expression to their feelings before you. to have guessed the truth from the timidity with which she had repeatedly approached her sarcasm, only bringing herself to utter it at last with an effort.
Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that’s even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary–never–no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.
Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice-that’s what it is-they are all full of malice, malice!
I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there’s a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don’t treat left nostrils, it’s not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there’s a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.
It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom , as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.
He walked on without resting. He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him – he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him… .
After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn (and it may never learn anything else; that isn’t very reassuring, but why not admit it?), while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it’s nevertheless alive.
Know, then, that now, precisely now, these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet. It is our doing, but is it what you wanted? This sort of freedom?’ Again I don’t understand’, Alyosha interrupted, ‘Is he being ironic? Is he laughing?’ Not in the least. He precisely lays it to his and his colleagues’ credit that they have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy.
It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.
You know, my boy, he said, it’s impossible to love men such as they are. And yet we must. So try to do good to men by doing violence to your feelings, holding your nose, and shutting your eyes, especially shutting your eyes. Endure their villainy without anger, as much as possible; try to remember that you’re a man too. For, if you’re even a little above average intelligence, you’ll have the propensity to judge people severely. Men are vile by nature and they’d rather love out of fear. Don’t give in to such love: despise it always.
I know you’ll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: “speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don’t go saying ‘we all.'” Excuse me, gentleman, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more “living” than you.
One can tell a child everything, anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters. How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!
Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars.
[to Jesus] You did not come down from the cross when they shouted to you, mocking and reviling you: “Come down from the cross and we will believe that it is you.” You did not come down because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous…I swear, man is created weaker and baser than you thought him! How, how can he ever accomplish the same things as you? …Respecting him less, you would have demanded less of him, and that would be closer to love, for his burden would be lighter.
My friends, ask gladness from God. Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man’s sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not feat that it will dampen your endeavor and keep it from being fulfilled, do not say, Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless, the bad environment will dampen us and keep our good endeavor from being fulfilled. Flee from such despondency, my children! There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for the sins of men.
Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. […] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already two months before and, poor as I am, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months had elapsed and it was still lying in the drawer. I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself. Why — I don’t know.
Then Christ will say to us, ‘Come you also! Come you drunkards! Come you weaklings! Come you depraved!’ And he will say to us, ‘Vile creatures, you in the image of the beast and you who bear his mark. All the same, you come too!’ And the wise and prudent will say, ‘Lord, why are you welcoming them? And he will say, ‘O wise and prudent, I am welcoming them because not one of them has ever judged himself worthy. And he will stretch out his arms to us, and we shall fall at his feet, and burst into sobs, and then we shall understand everything, everything! Lord, your kingdom come!
And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolations that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent nineteenth-century man must be, is morally bound to be, an essentially characterless creature; and a man of character, a man of action – an essentially limited creature. This is my conviction at the age of forty. I am forty now, and forty years – why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest of old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral!
Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath forever and yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death.
And so I ask myself: ‘Where are your dreams?’ And I shake my head and mutter: ‘How the years go by!’ And I ask myself again: ‘What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,’ I say to myself, ‘how cold it is becoming all over the world!’ And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .
Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart? Oh, Thou didst know that Thy deed would be recorded in books, would be handed down to remote times and the utmost ends of the earth, and Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft, though he might be a hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel.

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About Fyodor Dostoevsky

Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky