Great Throughts Treasury

"This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out; that you will never become a different man."

"Those innocent eyes cut my soul like a razor...however, in a depraved man this, too, might be only a sensual attraction."

"Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one's heart, out of old habit..."

"Those were not the sounds of a violin, but that seemed a terrible voice had begun to roar, for the first time in our dark house. Perhaps my impressions were distorted and sick, maybe my feelings were shocked by everything I had witnessed, and already predisposed to feel terrible, full of torment with no escape: but I am firmly convinced that I heard groans, human cries, tears, a whole despair poured into those sounds. ."

"Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the point of exasperation, yet I would not care to be in his place as he is now (though I will not stop envying him. No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous!) There, at any rate, one can-- bah! But after all, even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself as surely as two times two makes four, that it is not at all underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I long but which I cannot find! Damn underground!"

"Though the sleepy, myopic, and rather bald-pated figure reflected in the mirror was precisely of such insignificant quality as to arrest decidedly no one's exclusive attention at first sight, its owner evidently remained perfectly pleased with all he saw in the mirror."

"Though there was no longer anything to be astonished at, still manifest reality always has something shocking about it."

"Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen."

"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 tenfold 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."

"Thus a man will sometimes suffer half an hour of mortal fear with a robber, but once the knife is finally at his throat, even fear vanishes."

"Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation."

"Till the last moment they dress a man up in peacock's feathers, till the last moment they hope for the good and not the bad; and though they may have premonitions of the other side of the coin, for the life of them they will not utter a real word beforehand; the thought alone makes them cringe; they wave the truth away with both hands, till the very moment when the man they've decked out so finely sticks their noses in it with his own two hands."

"To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving."

"To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well."

"To a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in that form."

"To be surprised at everything is stupid of course, and to be astonished at nothing is a great deal more becoming and for some reason accepted as good form. But that is not really true. To my mind to be astonished at nothing is much more stupid than to be astonished at everything. And, moreover, to be astonished at nothing is almost the same as feeling respect for nothing. And indeed a stupid man is incapable of feeling respect."

"To be too conscious is an illness - a real thoroughgoing illness."

"To begin with, at home I spent most of my time reading. I wanted to stifle all that was continuously boiling up inside me through external impressions. Out of all external impressions, reading was the only one possible for me. Of course, reading helped a lot - it excited, delighted and tormented me. But at times it bored me to death. For all that I still wanted to be doing things and I would suddenly plunge into dark, subterranean, vile, not so much depravity as petty dissipation. My mean, trivial, lusts were keen and fiery as a result of my constant, morbid irritability. The surges were hysterical, always accompanied by tears and convulsion. Apart from reading I had nowhere to turn - I mean, there was nothing in my surroundings that I could respect then or to… Read more"

"To celebrate my first hour of freedom. It's been going on nearly six months, and all at once I've thrown it off. I could never have guessed, even yesterday how easy it would be to put an end to it if I wanted."

"To confess one's guilt and one's original sin is little, very little; one must wean oneself away from them completely. And that takes more than a little time."

"To consider freedom as directly dependent on the number of man’s requirements and the extent of their immediate satisfaction shows a twisted understanding of human nature, for such an interpretation only breeds in men a multitude of senseless, stupid desires and habits and endless preposterous inventions."

"To cook your hare you must first catch it."

"To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's."

"To insects--sensual lust."

"To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible. You may lead a soldier out and set him facing the cannon in battle and fire at him and he'll still hope; but read a sentence of certain death over that same soldier, and he will go out of his mind or burst into tears. Who can tell whether human nature is able to bear this without madness."

"To love a person means to see him as God intended him to be."

"To love another human should be hidden, and his face appeared still love."

"To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease."

"To my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief...Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith."

"To love someone is to see them as God intended."

"To return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there forever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them."

"To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things."

"To whom is he to go if you are not together, mother and father?"

"Tomorrow is the threat of nothingness, and will not be happy. This is an insult to the deep ... Therefore, I do not have to suffer and to be, in my mind that this is asking, and there are brazen nature of water beyond the plaintiff, the prosecutor and the defendant, along with myself, I'm doomed ... For I cannot destroy nature, I would just do it myself, there is no criminal endure a tyranny as weary."

"Too noisy and industrial becoming in humanity, a little peace spiritual, - complains one retired thinker. Let but the sound of carts, driving up bread to the hungry humanity, it may be better spiritual tranquility - triumphantly to the other, driving around everywhere thinker, and leaves him with vanity. I do not believe ... carts, driving up the bread to humanity!"

"Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth."

"Truly,' I answered him, 'all things are good and fair, because all is truth. Look,' said I, 'at the horse, that great beast that is so near to man; or the lowly, pensive ox, which feeds him and works for him; look at their faces, what meekness, what devotion to man, who often beats them mercilessly. What gentleness, what confidence and what beauty! It's touching to know that there's no sin in them, for all, all except man, is sinless, and Christ has been with them before us."

"Trust no one in whom the desire to punish is strong."

"Truth won't escape you, but life can be cramped."

"Twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death."

"Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too."

"Twice two is four is, in my opinion, nothing but impudence."

"Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?"

"Unhappiness is a contagious disease. Unhappy, even miserable wretches, each other in order to avoid the poor."

"To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering -- that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead."

"Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass"

"Very different is the monastic way. Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet they alone constitute the way to real and true freedom: I cut away my superfluous and unnecessary needs, through obedience I humble and chasten my vain and proud will, and thereby, with God’s help, attain freedom of spirit, and with that, spiritual rejoicing!"

"Very often among a certain highly intelligent type of people, quite paradoxical ideas will establish themselves. But they have suffered so much in their lives for these ideas, and have paid so high a price for them that it becomes very painful, indeed almost impossible, for them to part with them."

"Tyranny is a habit; it may develop, and it does develop at last, into a disease. I maintain that the very best of men may be coarsened and hardened into a brute by habit. Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost forever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."

"To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise."