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You weep, yet you go!
There are people, gentlemen, who dislike roundabout ways and only mask themselves at masquerades.
to the bold all ways lie open!”
“If I fail I don’t lose heart, if I succeed I persevere.”
persons who wear a mask have become far from uncommon, and that nowadays it is hard to recognize the man beneath the mask...”
crime will always remain crime, that sin will always be sin, shameful, abominable, dishonourable, to whatever height of grandeur you raise the vicious feeling!
A base soul escaping from oppression becomes an oppressor.
Youth is sometimes excessively vain, and youthful vanity is almost always cowardly.
‘If thou would’st conquer all the world —conquer thyself.’
I am convinced that you love not him—not this unnatural boy,—but your lost happiness, your broken hopes, your cracked idol!
“But all things die, Zina, even our memories, and our good and noble feelings die also, and in their place comes reason.
There are men who have never killed any one, and who, nevertheless, are more atrocious than those who have assassinated six persons.
“Send a man there and he becomes a child, and just throws himself on all he sees”; that is what people say of those transported to Siberia.
Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.
I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness
“Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.
But 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.
Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation.
What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason...
You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!
Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other 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. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.
It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing.
There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process!
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,”
As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
“He does not say much,” he used to say, “and thinks the more.”
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 fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. 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.
For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.
And, above all—don’t lie.”
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. 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, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offen...
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Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”
I stand and look about me and see that scarcely any one else cares; no one troubles his head about it, and I’m the only one who can’t stand it.
The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
People who saw something pensive and sullen in his eyes were startled by his sudden laugh, which bore witness to mirthful and light-hearted thoughts at the very time when his eyes were so gloomy.
Meanwhile, in your despair, you, too, divert yourself with magazine articles, and discussions in society, though you don’t believe your own arguments, and with an aching heart mock at them inwardly...
You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness.
Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity.”
The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
“There would have been no civilization if they hadn’t invented God.”
for me, I’ve long resolved not to think whether man created God or God man.
For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”
they’ve eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they have become ‘like gods.’They
“I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” “Just as he did God, then?” observed Alyosha.
