The Possessed (The Devils)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

He fondly loved, for instance, his position as a "persecuted" man and, so to speak, an "exile."

It is true that he was passionately fond of writing, he wrote to her though he lived in the same house, and during hysterical interludes he would write two letters a day. I know for a fact that she always read these letters with the greatest attention, even when she received two a day, and after reading them she put them away in a special drawer, sorted and annotated;

the depths of the female heart have not been explored to this day.

She fell in love with the portrait at once, after the habit of all girls at school who fall in love with anything they come across, as well as with their teachers, especially the drawing and writing masters.

The latter at the first word exclaimed, "You must be a general if you talk like that," meaning that he could find no word of abuse worse than "general."

And he who has no people has no God. You may be sure that all who cease to understand their own people and lose their connection with them at once lose to the same extent the faith of their fathers, and become atheistic or indifferent.

Stepan Trofimovitch succeeded in reaching the deepest chords in his pupil's heart, and had aroused in him a vague sensation of that eternal, sacred yearning which some elect souls can never give up for cheap gratification when once they have tasted and known it.

It's not through strength of will but through weakness that people hang themselves,

"Why is it—as I've noticed," Stepan Trofimovitch whispered to me once, "why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are at the same time such incredible skinflints, so avaricious, so keen over property, and, in fact, the more socialistic, the more extreme they are, the keener they are over property... why is it? Can that, too, come from sentimentalism?"

all these talented gentlemen of the middling sort who are sometimes in their lifetime accepted almost as geniuses, pass out of memory quite suddenly and without a trace when they die, and what's more, it often happens that even during their lifetime, as soon as a new generation grows up and takes the place of the one in which they have flourished, they are forgotten and neglected by every one in an incredibly short time.

It's simply killing.

"Every one cannot judge except from himself," he said, reddening. "There will be full freedom when it will be just the same to live or not to live. That's the goal for all."

"Man fears death because he loves life. That's how I understand it," I observed, "and that's determined by nature."

"Life is pain, life is terror, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and terror. Now man loves life, because he loves pain and terror, and so they have done according. Life is given now for pain and terror, and that's the deception. Now man is not yet what he will be. There will be a new man, happy and proud. For whom it will be the same to live or not to live, he will be the new man. He who will conquer pain and terror will himself be a god. And this God will not be."

Every one who wants the supreme freedom must dare to kill himself. He who dares to kill himself has found out the secret of the deception. There is no freedom beyond; that is all, and there is nothing beyond. He who dares kill himself is God.

I'm a capricious child, with all the egoism of a child and none of the innocence.

Oh, my friend, marriage is the moral death of every proud soul, of all independence.

'I think,' said I, 'that God and nature are just the same thing.'

It's rather as it is in religion; the harder life is for a man or the more crushed and poor the people are, the more obstinately they dream of compensation in heaven;

"My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it. Men have always done so. Perhaps there's something in it that passes our understanding.

'If there's no God, how can I be a captain then?'

"You've begun to believe in a future eternal life?" "No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still, and it will become eternal."

"You don't say prayers yourself?" "I pray to everything. You see the spider crawling on the wall, I look at it and thank it for crawling."

"not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason. There has never been an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the very first proclaimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society, and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason. Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be

God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own.

The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil.

The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods.

I am a luckless, tedious book,

"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is usually made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."

'One must really be a great man to be able to make a stand even against common sense.'

Gogol's 'The Last Story.'

What will people think? What will the world say?"

"Your umbrella.... Am I worth it?" said the captain over-sweetly. "Anyone is worthy of an umbrella." "At one stroke you define the minimum of human rights...."

Stepan Trofimovitch assured me on one occasion that the very highest artistic talents may exist in the most abominable blackguards, and that the one thing does not interfere with the other.

In every misfortune of one's neighbour there is always something cheering for an onlooker—whoever he may be.

I want to put an end to my life, because that's my idea, because I don't want to be afraid of death,

'I can't' doesn't mean 'I don't want to.'

in fact I've noticed that faith always seems to be less in the daytime."

we know that so far nothing has happened in the world new enough to be worth our weeping at having missed it.

"You are all like that! Ready to argue for six months to practise your Liberal eloquence and in the end you vote the same as the rest!

"Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles."—Voltaire, Candide.

majors and colonels who ridiculed the senselessness of the service, and who would have been ready for an extra rouble to unbuckle their swords, and take jobs as railway clerks; generals who had abandoned their duties to become lawyers;

The whole difficulty lies in the question which is more beautiful, Shakespeare or boots, Raphael or petroleum?"

"I maintain that Shakespeare and Raphael are more precious than the emancipation of the serfs, more precious than Nationalism, more precious than Socialism, more precious than the young generation, more precious than chemistry, more precious than almost all humanity because they are the fruit, the real fruit of all humanity and perhaps the highest fruit that can be. A form of beauty already attained, but for the attaining of which I would not perhaps consent to live....

without the English, life is still possible for humanity, without Germany, life is possible, without the Russians it is only too possible, without science, without bread, life is possible—only without beauty it is impossible, for there will be nothing left in the world.

You can never manage things with the police alone in any society, anywhere. Among us every one asks for a special policeman to protect him wherever he goes. People don't understand that society must protect itself.

"Because reading books and having them bound are two different stages of development, and there's a vast gulf between them. To begin with, a man gradually gets used to reading, in the course of ages of course, but takes no care of his books and throws them about, not thinking them worth attention. But binding implies respect for books, and implies that not only he has grown fond of reading, but that he looks upon it as something of value. That period has not been reached anywhere in Russia yet. In Europe books have been bound for a long while."

life is a beastly thing for a decent man..."

God is necessary and so must exist." "Well, that's all right, then." "But I know He doesn't and can't." "That's more likely." "Surely you must understand that a man with two such ideas can't go on living?" "Must shoot himself, you mean?" "Surely you must understand that one might shoot oneself for that alone? You don't understand that there may be a man, one man out of your thousands of millions, one man who won't bear it and does not want to."

If there is no God, then I am God." "There, I could never understand that point of yours: why are you God?" "If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it's all my will and I am bound to show self-will." "Self-will? But why are you bound?" "Because all will has become mine. Can it be that no one in the whole planet, after making an end of God and believing in his own will, will dare to express his self-will on the most vital point? It's like a beggar inheriting a fortune and being afraid of it and not daring to approach the bag of gold, thinking himself too weak to own it.