The Brothers Karamazov

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I feel that you’re the only creature in the world who has not condemned me.

Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist.

“I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.” In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist.

Perhaps the slanting sunlight and the holy image to which his poor “crazy” mother had held him up still acted upon his imagination.

“Nevertheless I would rather bite out my tongue than be lacking in respect to the sainted man whom you reverence so highly,”

I play the fool, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, to make myself agreeable.

Of a truth, I am a lie, and the father of lies. Though I believe I am not the father of lies. I am getting mixed in my texts.

“What do I care for your faith?” Miüsov was on the point of shouting, but he suddenly checked himself, and said with contempt, “You defile everything you touch.”

‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.

Every one knew, or had heard of, the extremely restless and dissipated life which he had been leading of late, as well as of the violent anger to which he had been roused in his quarrels with his father.

There is no virtue if there is no immortality.”

But the martyr likes sometimes to divert himself with his despair, as it were driven to it by despair itself.

“It’s all a lie! Outwardly it’s the truth, but inwardly a lie!”

I regret it now, and I’m disgusted with myself for my brutal rage.