Great Throughts Treasury

"People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel."

"People talk sometimes about crimes of bestiality, but this is an injustice and an insult to the animals, cannot harden like a human, crying and nibbles and no more than that, he does not think people from their ears, even if able to do so."

"People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it."

"People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact."

"Perezvon (the dog) ran about in the wildest spirits, sniffing about first one side, then the other. When he met other dogs they zealously smelt each other over according to the rules of canine etiquette."

"Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything."

"Perhaps I'm being unfair to you," he said, still not sounding like himself." My feeling must be of the species they call passion. . . One thing I know for sure: without you it's the end of me, and with you it's also the end. It makes no difference where you are: far or near, you're always present. I also know that I could hate you a good deal more than I could love you. .. I'm sorry that I had to fall in love with someone like you."

"Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling and howling through the forest—moaning with a hungry sound as it strips the leaves from the bare boughs, and whirls them into the air. High over the tree-tops, in a widespread, trailing, noisy crew, there fly, with resounding cries, flocks of birds which seem to darken and overlay the very heavens. Then a strange feeling comes over one, until one seems to hear the voice of someone whispering: "Run, run, little child! Do not be out late, for this place will soon have become dreadful! Run, little child! Run!" And at the words terror will possess one's soul, and one will rush and rush until one's breath is spent—until, panting, one has reached home."

"Perhaps then, merely on the strength of their desires and rated himself as a man who is allowed more than others."

"Perhaps, you will add, grinning, those who have never been slapped will also not understand - thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur."

"Poor people like him, do not like to see all the people offering them improved, so shove themselves too much."

"Poor Sonya! What a little gold-mine they've managed to get hold of there! And profit from! Oh yes, they draw their profits from it! And they've got used to it. They wept at first, but now they are used to it. Men are scoundrels, they can get used to anything!"

"Poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know that drunkenness too is not a virtue and that's even truer. But destitution, dear sir, destitution is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in destitution-never-no-one. For destitution a man is not chased out of society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, for in destitution I am the first to humiliate myself."

"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!"

"Practicality is a difficult thing to find; it does not drop down from heaven. And for the last two hundred years we have been divorced from all practical life. Ideas, if you like, are fermenting, and desire for good exists, though it’s in a childish form, and honesty you may find, although there are crowds of brigands. Anyway, there’s no practicality. Practicality goes well shod."

"Pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say, 'Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.' Fly from that dejection, children!"

"Prayer is an education."

"Precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the hearth knows how to find what is precious."

"Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously."

"Rakitin doesn't understand it, all he wants is to build his house and rent out rooms...Life is simple for Rakitin: 'You'd do better to worry about extending mans’ civil rights,' he told me today, 'or at least about not letting the price of beef go up; you'd render your love for mankind more simply and directly that way than with any philosophies.' But I came back at him: 'And without God,' I said, 'you'll hike up the price of beef yourself, if the chance comes your way, and make a ruble on every kopeck."

"Real life oppressed me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe."

"Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification."

"Reality is infinitely diverse. It resists classification, inward life. Peculiar to us...not simply the official existence."

"Reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life -- that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches."

"Reason is passion's slave, is it not?"

"Reason is the slave of passion."

"Rebellion? I don't like hearing such a word from you, Ivan said with feeling. One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me straight out, I call on you--answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears--would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth. No, I would not agree, Alyosha said softly. And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy? No, I cannot admit it."

"Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints."

"Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance.... Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do.... It constitutes the murder of your own ideas."

"Remember, college boy, primo: stay away from the fire lie; Second: stay away from it even if it's about doing a good deed."

"Repeat to yourself every day and as often as you can: ‘O Lord, have mercy on all those who will appear before You today.’ For every hour, every second, thousands of men leave this world and their souls appear before the Lord, and no one knows how many of them leave this earth in isolation, sadness, and anguish, with no one to take pity on them or even care whether they live or die. And so your prayer for such a man will rise to the Lord from the other end of the earth, although he may never have heard of you or you of him. But his soul, as it stands trembling before the Lord, will be cheered and gladdened to learn that there is someone on earth who loves him. And the Lord’s mercy will be even greater to both of you, for, however great your pity for the man, God’s pity will be much greater, for He is infinitely more merciful and more loving than you are."

"Resentment-why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and painful consciousness!"

"Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time."

"Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia."

"Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time."

"Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless."

"Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his effort?"

"Science which has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred. But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous."

"She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice."

"She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age."

"She was very fond of thinking and getting at the truth of things, but was so far from being pedantic, so full of youthful ways that from the first moment one began to love all these originalities in her, and to accept them... This naive combination in her of the child and the thinking woman, this childlike and absolutely genuine thirst for truth and justice, and absolute faith in her impulses--all this lighted up her face with a fine glow of sincerity, giving it a lofty, spiritual beauty, and one began to understand that it was not so easy to gauge the full significance of that beauty which was not all at once apparent to every ordinary unsympathetic eye."

"Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea...and even then every man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element...simply in order to prove to himself that men still are men and not piano keys."

"Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel."

"Smart people fall into the trap of such simple things. How much people so smart, simple things is little doubt that trap will be reduced."

"So a man will sometimes go through half an hour of mortal terror with a brigand, yet when the knife is at his throat at last, he feels no fear."

"So case souls romance always, remain until the last moment people adorned with peacock feathers. Remain until the last moment assumes that good, and not evil, despite unimaginable existence of evil they cannot recognize it for herself in any way. To visualize this evil alone Asdamha shook strong. They are hands obscured her face so as not to see the truth, that the man who comes decorated with colorful feathers of imagination Faisf and her face and bloody nose with his hand the same!"

"So I felt become understandable to me the strange obstinacy of that chaste heart, which was closed for a time, opposing to his desire to vent the greater stiffness, until the inevitable momentum in which the whole being is allowed until to forgetfulness of himself, this human need for affection, expansion, caress and tears..."

"So that everything will be destroyed. Oh, how nice it would be if everything were destroyed! You know, Alyosha, I sometimes think of doing a lot of harm. I would do it for a long while secretly and then suddenly everyone would find out. Everyone will stand around and point their fingers at me and I will look at them all. That would be awfully nice."

"So that you remember that you kissed my hand, but I didn't kiss yours."

"She has known all the time that I cared for her--though I never said a word of my love to her--"