It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ.
My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
From his note regarding the Grand Inquisitor
(The Brothers Karamazov). |
f 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 up.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are
fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has
created him in his own image and likeness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Kavamazov. |
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering
its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The House of the Dead. |
To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the
most terrible punishment so that the most ferocious murderer
would shudder at it beforehand, one need only give him work
of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
House of the Dead. |
What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever
that independence may cost and wherever it mjay lead.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Note from Underground. |
Power is given only to him who dates to stoop and take it
... one must have the courage to dare.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment. |
I wanted to murder, for my own satisfaction ... At that moment
I did not care a damn whether I would spend the rest of my life
like a spider catching them all in my web and sucking the living
juices out of them.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment. |
Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing
easier than flattery.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment. |
Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men,
but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will ...
Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment. |
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes
unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else,
and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
The more I detest men individually the more ardent
becomes my love for humanity.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
It's not that I don't accept God, you must understand; it's
the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
Too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means
to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back
my entrance ticket ... It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha,
only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with
the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace
and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to
torture to death only one tiny creature ... and to found that
edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the
architect on those conditions?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being
unable to love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their
martyrs and honor those they have slain.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
Everything is permitted.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing,
and quite unconsciously.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand
of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals,
love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you
will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive
it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you
will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing
love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov. |
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