The Brothers Karamazov

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish—such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them.

“Completely at home? You mean in my natural state? Oh, that is much, too much—but I’m touched, and I accept! You know, blessed father, you shouldn’t challenge me to be in my natural state, you shouldn’t risk it … I myself will not go so far as to be in my natural state. I’m warning you in order to protect you.

Wickedness is sweet: everyone denounces it, but everyone lives in it, only they all do it on the sly and I do it openly. And for this ingenuousness of mine, the wicked ones all attack me.

Indeed, people speak sometimes about the ‘animal’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

Do you know that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men?

See, here you have passed by a small child, passed by in anger, with a foul word, with a wrathful soul; you perhaps did not notice the child, but he saw you, and your unsightly and impious image has remained in his defenseless heart. You did not know it, but you may thereby have planted a bad seed in him, and it may grow, and all because you did not restrain yourself before the child, because you did not nurture in yourself a heedful, active love.