Wonder Confronts Certainty Quotes

“Life is shaped by fate, but meaning depends on what we choose.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“[Anton] Chekhov's wisest characters arrive not a final answers, but at a deeper understanding of questions.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“If there is no ideal above personal happiness, no one will sacrifice life for country, civilization, or anything else.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“...a key idea in Russian literature: the meaning of life can be revealed only to those who suffer. The happy can doze, the miserable must reflect. 'Suffering lays bare the real nature of things,' Evgeniya Ginzburg observed. 'It is the price to be paid for a deeper, more truthful understanding of life.' Suffering sometimes reveals higher meanings and, as Solzhenitsyn insisted, 'nothing worthwhile can be built on a neglect of higher meanings.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“The sense of meaning changes no fact in the world. It changes one's experience of the world as a whole.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“Goodness is not a matter of effects or rewards because to perform an action because of the benefits it confers is not to perform it because it is right.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“The greatest Russian writers do not tell us what life's meaning is, but they show us what the discovery of it looks and feels like. That is because meaning is not a proposition we could learn, as we master the binomial theorem. If there were such a proposition, we would already know it. It would be the first thing we had been taught.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“In epics, the transcendent value of glory is a given, but in the novel it is, like other ideals, open to question and tested by experience.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“The peculiarly intense sense of drama and 'eventness' that rivets the attention of Dostoevsky's readers results from their intuitive sense that the author is learning about the characters as much as they are.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“We all enjoy evil, or why would there be so much of it? Most derives from people like us. Thinking of it as superhuman or alien allows us to persist in it.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

“...it is details that comprise life. That is where God is.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter