The Brothers Karamazov

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.

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.

The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one.

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In

I understand that I was really only seeking your approbation for my sincerity

Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself.

But active love is labour and fortitude,

there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours.

that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried

My rule has been that you can always find something devilishly interesting in every woman that you wouldn’t find in any other.

Only, one must know how to find it, that’s the point! That’s a talent!

For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man.

be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears . . . Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly.

For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal,

For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly.

For if you’ve money, Alexey Fyodorovitch, you have only to want a thing and you can have it.

They are like a cloud of dust. When the wind blows, the dust will be gone

that a character like Katerina Ivanovna’s must dominate,

If he loved any one, he set to work at once to help him. And to do so he must know what he was aiming at; he must know for certain what was best for each, and having ascertained this it was natural for him to help them both. But instead of a definite aim, he found nothing but uncertainty and perplexity on all sides.

heart, he felt ashamed at having shown me his inmost soul like that. So he began to hate me at once.

“Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it’s only then one will understand the meaning of it.

that the face of a man often hinders many people not practiced in love,

And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s suffering (as though it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot.

Beggars, especially genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves, but to ask for charity through the newspapers. One can love one’s neighbours in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible.

For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.

“is it really so wonderful in these days to find a man who can repent of his stupidity and publicly confess his wrongdoing?” “But

So prone is the man of the world to be ashamed of any righteous action.

“You are, I see, a man of great strength of character,” he said; “as you have dared to serve the truth, even when by doing so you risked incurring the contempt of all.”

“And that we are all responsible to all for all,

And in very truth, so soon as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a dream, but a living reality.”

Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to every one, brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all. Every one will think his share too small and they will be always envying, complaining and attacking one another. You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have to go through the period of isolation.” “What do you mean by isolation?” I asked him. “Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fulness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fulness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself n...

them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants.

therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world,

Work without ceasing. If you remember in the night as you go to sleep, “I have not done what I ought to have done,” rise up at once and do it. If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame

If the evil-doing of men moves you to indignation and overwhelming distress, even to a desire for vengeance on the evil-doers, shun above all things that feeling.

“men love the downfall and disgrace of the righteous,”

“It’s possible for one who doesn’t believe in God to love mankind, don’t you think

it is above all essential to put one’s personality in contradiction to one’s reality.’

there are two sorts of truths for me—one, their truth, yonder, which I know nothing about so far, and the other my own. And there’s no knowing which will turn out the better

‘There are new men,’ you decided last spring, when you were meaning to come here, ‘they propose to destroy everything and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! they didn’t ask my advice! I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the idea of God in man, that’s how we have to set to work. It’s that, that we must begin with.

Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all of them denied God—and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass—the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what’s more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world.

The great aim of his life was to be a man of advanced ideas.

Dmitri Karamazov is a scoundrel, but not a thief.”

“Gentlemen of the jury,” began the prosecutor, “this case has made a stir throughout Russia. But what is there to wonder at, what is there so peculiarly horrifying in it for us? We are so accustomed to such crimes! That’s what’s so horrible, that such dark deeds have ceased to horrify us. What ought to horrify us is that we are so accustomed to it, and not this or that isolated crime. What are the causes of our indifference, our lukewarm attitude to such deeds, to such signs of the times, ominous

Is it our cynicism, is it the premature exhaustion of intellect and imagination in a society that is sinking into decay, in spite of its youth? Is it that our moral principles are shattered to their foundations, or is it, perhaps, a complete lack of such principles among us? I cannot answer such questions; nevertheless they are disturbing, and every citizen not only must, but ought to be harassed by them.

Look how our young people commit suicide, without asking themselves Hamlet’s question what there is beyond, without a sign of such a question, as though all that relates to the soul and to what awaits us beyond the grave had long been erased in their minds and buried under the sands.

But we must one day begin life in sober earnest, we must look at ourselves as a society; it’s time we tried to grasp something of our social position, or at least to make a beginning in that direction.

He was an example of everything that is opposed to civic duty, of the most complete and malignant individualism. ‘The world may burn for aught I care, so long as I am all right,’ and he was all right;

he was content, he was eager to go on living in the same way for another twenty or thirty years.

and let us say plainly, the father is not merely he who begets the child, but he who begets it and does his duty by it.