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“Othello is not jealous, he is trustful,” Pushkin observed,1 and this one observation already testifies to the remarkable depth of our great poet’s mind.
I learned that it is impossible not only to live a scoundrel, but also to die a scoundrel … No, gentlemen, one must die honestly … !”
So I lied, and that’s it, I lied once and then I didn’t want to correct it. Why does a man lie sometimes?”
Every day of my life I’ve been beating my breast and promising to reform, and every day I’ve done the same vile things.
“But what for? I’m only sad that such a lovely nature as yours, which has not yet begun to live, should already be perverted by all this crude nonsense.”
Oh, Karamazov, I’m profoundly unhappy. Sometimes I imagine God knows what, that everyone is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I … then I’m quite ready to destroy the whole order of things.” “And you torment the people around you,” Alyosha smiled. “And I torment the people around me, especially my mother. Tell me, Karamazov, am I very ridiculous now?”
I’m only surprised that you’ve begun to feel it so early, though, by the way, I’ve been noticing it for a long time, and not in you alone. Nowadays even children almost are already beginning to suffer from it. It’s almost a madness. The devil has incarnated himself in this vanity and crept into a whole generation—precisely the devil,”
“Oh, how I love you and value you right now, precisely because you, too, are ashamed of something with me! Because you’re just like me!” Kolya exclaimed, decidedly in ecstasy. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes shining.
‘You’d do better to worry about extending man’s civil rights,’ he told me today, ‘or at least about not letting the price of beef go up; you’d render your love for mankind more simply and directly that way than with any philosophies.’
Why do I suffer then? Out of habit. Out of universal human habit over seven thousand years.
Let us first fulfill Christ’s commandment ourselves, and only then let us expect the same of our children.
A man sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude still intends to be happy—isn’t that pitiful?
You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.
