Great Throughts Treasury

"A hundred suspicions don't make a proof."

"A lot of people turn reasoning sometimes have a strong passion seizes on the whole they are very difficult to expel or modified. In order to heal a wounded man with the disease, we must change this passion, this is only possible to replace this passion bees other power equally."

"A man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing."

"A man's perishing here, a man's vanishing from his own sight here, and can't control himself--what sort of wedding can there be!"

"A moment full of happiness? Yes! And it is not enough to flood a life?"

"A novel requires a hero, and here there's a deliberate collection of all the traits for an anti-hero."

"A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory.... Once you've said 'percentage' there's nothing more to worry about. If we had any other word... maybe we might feel more uneasy...."

"A person's true security consists not in his own personal, solitary effort, but in the common integrity of mankind."

"A priest went about among them with a cross, and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live. He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where...? The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!'"

"A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about."

"A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space."

"A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds."

"A wise man can't seriously make himself anything, only a fool makes himself anything."

"About myself I can tell you that I have gotten my life, child of doubt and disbelief, to stay and I will be it (I know) to death."

"Abstract love for humanity is almost always a selfish love hiding from yourself."

"Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do."

"Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it's like a dream."

"Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one's life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science."

"Active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science. But I predict that even in that very moment when you see with horror that despite all your efforts, you not only have not come nearer your goal but seem to have gotten farther from it, at that very moment--I predict this to you--you will suddenly reach your goal and will clearly behold over you the wonder-working power of the Lord, who all the while has been loving you, and all the while has been mysteriously guiding you."

"Affliction is not planted in the minds of anyone other wisdom."

"After all, bluff and real emotion exist so easily side by side."

"After all, it is sometimes rather enjoyable to feel insulted, is it not? For the person knows that no one has insulted him, and that he himself has thought up the insult and told lies as an ornament, has exaggerated in order to create a certain impression, has seized on a word and made a mountain out of a molehill? is well aware of this, and yet is the very first to feel insulted, feel insulted to the point of pleasure, to the point of great satisfaction, and for that very reason ends up nurturing a sense of true animosity?"

"After all, man may be fond not only of well-being. Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as much in his interest as well-being?"

"Again it became suddenly plain and perceptible to him that he had just told a fearful lie - that he would never now be able to speak freely of everything - that he would never again be able to speak of anything to anyone."

"Ah, Father! That’s words and only words! Forgive! If he’d not been run over, he’d have come home today drunk and his only shirt dirty and in rags and he’d have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been sousing and rinsing till daybreak, washing his rags and the children’s and then drying them by the window and as soon as it was daylight I should have been darning them. What’s the use of talking forgiveness! I have forgiven as it is!"

"Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don't want millions, but an answer to their questions."

"Ah, Nastenka! Why, one thanks some people for being alive at the same time with one; I thank you for having met me, for my being able to remember you all my life!"

"Alas! I always loved sorrow and tribulation, but only for myself, for myself; but I wept over them, pitying them. I stretched out my hands to them in despair, blaming, cursing and despising myself. I told them that all this was my doing, mine alone; that it was I had brought them corruption, contamination and falsity. I besought them to crucify me, I taught them how to make a cross. I could not kill myself, I had not the strength, but I wanted to suffer at their hands. I yearned for suffering, I longed that my blood should be drained to the last drop in these agonies. But they only laughed at me, and began at last to look upon me as crazy. They justified me, they declared that they had only got what they wanted themselves, and that all that now was could not have been otherwise. At last they declared to me that I was becoming dangerous and that they should lock me up in a madhouse if I did not hold my tongue. Then such grief took possession of my soul that my heart was wrung, and I felt as though I were dying; and then . . . then I awoke."

"Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask you, is such a man free?"

"Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this landowner- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity- the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough- but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it."

"All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones."

"All is lawful."

"All my life I did not want it to be only words. This is why I lived, because I kept not wanting it. And now, too, every day I want it not to be words."

"All night, the black serpent of wounded vanity gnawed his heart."

"All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already two months before and, poor as I am, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months had elapsed and it was still lying in the drawer. I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself. Why -- I don't know."

"All the acts of man in fact consist of only one thing is proven himself at every moment."

"All this exile to hard labor, and formerly with floggings, does not reform anyone, and above all does not even frighten almost any criminal, and the number of crimes not only does not diminish but increases all the more. Surely you will admit that. And it turns out that society, thus, is not protected at all, for although the harmful member is mechanically cut off and sent away far out of sight, another criminal appears at once to take his place, perhaps even two others. If anything protects society even in our time, and even reforms the criminal himself and transforms him into a different person, again it is Christ's law alone, which manifests itself in the acknowledgement of one's own conscience."

"All this is that I do not respect myself: but he that is known can be estimated, even a little bit?"

"All we Karamazovs are such insects. And angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest - worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets before us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not an educated nor cultured man, Alyosha, but I've thought a lot about this. It's terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad. I'd have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."

"Allow me to give you some advice from the heart: don’t give up art, and even give yourself over to it even more than so far… Living in solitude and embittering your soul with recollections, you can make your life very gloomy. There is a single refuge, a single medicine: art and creative work."

"Although Pulcheria Alexandrovna was forty-three, her face still retained traces of her former beauty; 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. We may add in parenthesis that to preserve all this is the only means of retaining beauty to old age."

"Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness."

"Alyosha brought with him something his father had never known before: a complete absence of contempt for him and a consistent kindness, a perfectly natural, unaffected devotion to the old man who deserved so little."

"Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth. He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears... rang in his soul. What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and he was not ashamed of this ecstasy. It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, touching other worlds. He wanted to forgive everyone and foreverything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! But for all and foreverything, as others are asking for me, rang again in his soul. But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind-now for the whole of his life and unto ages of ages. He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in all his life would Alyosha forget that moment. Someone visited my soul in that hour, he would say afterwards, with firm belief in his words."

"Alyosha was certain that no one in the whole world ever would want to hurt him, and what is more, he knew that no one could hurt him. This was for him an axiom, assumed once and for all without question. And he went his way without hesitation, relying on it."

"Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help."

"Among the memories of each person, there are things she does not count for anyone, only for friends. There are also those that it does not count for friends, but only for the same, and this secretly. But finally, there are also those which the individual is afraid to reveal even to himself, and a respectable man has such things accumulated in large quantities. And it can be anyway: the more respectable he is, more such things he has accumulated. I for one, only recently took courage to remember some of my past adventures, which until now had avoided with a certain uneasiness. And now, when not only remembered, but even I decided to write them, now just want to take the test: it is entirely possible for someone to be honest with himself and not fear all the truth? The purpose: Heine states that it is almost impossible sincere autobiographies exist because in some humans lie, speaking of himself. In his opinion, for example, Rousseau undoubtedly lied about himself in his 'Confessions' and made ??it up deliberately, by vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right; totally understand how sometimes one can confess to a series of crimes by sheer vanity and to realize very well that this type may be vanity."

"An angel in heaven I've told already; but I want to tell an angel on earth."

"An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing - that was what his days on earth held in store for him... What good was life to him? What prospects did he have? What did he have to strive for? Was he to live merely in order to exist? But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for an imagining. Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that. Perhaps it was merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others."

"An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy."