Great Throughts Treasury

"Why must you invariably be the first to move aside? I kept asking myself in hysterical rage, waking up sometimes at three o'clock in the morning. Why is it you and not he? There's no regulation..."

"Why should he live? What to make? Striving. What? Should he live, just to exist?"

"Why would he ... Will not you? Why do not you like? It costs less, and yet, I like him better than you."

"Will Otrat a little before that curse Judah this. God alone knows what lies deep in the hearts of drunks. Idiot"

"With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath."

"With the anthill, the respectable race of ants began and with the anthill they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and staidness. But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like the chess-player, loves only the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (on cannot swear to it), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, or in other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which of course must always be two times two makes four, that is a formula, and after all, two times two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been somehow afraid of this two times two makes four, and I am afraid of it even now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that two times two makes four, that he sails the oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it -- he is somehow afraid, I assure you. He feels that as soon as he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for."

"Without a firm idea of himself and the purpose of his life, man cannot live, and would sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if he was surrounded by bread."

"Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread"."

"Without God all things are permitted."

"Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophecy."

"Why would disappear and give way to other place where you can stay progressive and older? We will be cutting-edge, so will we and older. Become a servant to become elders."

"Woe to the man who offends a small child!"

"Words are not deeds."

"Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that’s just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That’s what they regard as the highest point of progress."

"Yeah, man, life is tough. I think the best compliment that can be made ??from people is: Man is the creature that gets used to everything."

"Yeah, the world port, just a menu is good."

"Yes — you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who're no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse — that's my fate. What do I care that you do not understand any of this?"

"Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream — oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!"

"Yes, Lise. You see, your question whether we do not despise that unhappy man by dissecting his soul was the question of a person who has suffered a lot. I'm afraid I don't know how to put it properly, but a person to whom such questions occur is himself capable of suffering."

"Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. 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."

"Yes, the laws of self-preservation and of self-destruction are equally powerful in this world. The devil will hold his empire over humanity until a limit of time which is still unknown. You laugh? You do not believe in the devil? Scepticism as to the devil is a French idea, and it is also a frivolous idea. Do you know who the devil is? Do you know his name? Although you don't know his name you make a mockery of his form, following the example of Voltaire. You sneer at his hoofs, at his tail, at his horns—all of them the produce of your imagination! In reality the devil is a great and terrible spirit, with neither hoofs, nor tail, nor horns; it is you who have endowed him with these attributes! But… he is not the question just now!"

"Yes, yes! You've spoken my own thought, they love it, they all love it, and love it always, not just at 'moments.' You know, it's as if at some point they all agreed to lie about it, and have been lying about it ever since. They all say they hate what's bad, but secretly they all love it."

"Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood. Oh, at first perhaps it began innocently, with a jest, coquetry, with amorous play, perhaps indeed with a germ, but that germ of falsity made its way into their hearts and pleased them. Then sensuality was soon begotten, sensuality begot jealousy, jealousy - cruelty . . . Oh, I don't know, I don't remember; but soon, very soon the first blood was shed. They marveled and were horrified, and began to be split up and divided. They formed into unions, but it was against one another. Reproaches, upbraidings followed. They came to know shame, and shame brought them to virtue. The conception of honor sprang up, and every union began waving its flags. They began torturing animals, and the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became hostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, for isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed at the possibility of this happiness in the past, and called it a dream. They could not even imagine it in definite form and shape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lost all faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they so longed to be happy and innocent once more that they succumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, set up temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire; though at the same time they fully believed that it was unattainable and could not be realized, yet they bowed down to it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could have happened that they had returned to the innocent and happy condition which they had lost, and if someone had shown it to them again and had asked them whether they wanted to go back to it, they would certainly have refused. They answered me: We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness."

"Yet there have been and still are mathematicians and philosophers who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry. They even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity."

"Yet as the evening of Sunday came on, a sadness as of death would overtake me, for at nine o'clock I had to return to school, where everything was cold and strange and severe—where the governesses, on Mondays, lost their tempers, and nipped my ears, and made me cry."

"You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don't even believe in virtue--that's what makes you angry and torments you, that's why you're so vindictive."

"Yet, I didn't understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently invaded; and who, until the last moment, refuse to yield out of pride and are afraid to express their own feelings to you."

"You are in the grip of a desire for martyrdom and self-sacrifice; conquer this desire as well, set aside your pages and your intention--and then you will overcome everything. You will put to shame all your pride and your demon! You will win, you will attain freedom..."

"You are ill, he has an excess of goodness, and that goodness is precisely what exposes you to catch."

"You are more needed there. There is no peace there."

"You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day."

"You ask yourself: where are your dreams now? And you shake your head and say how swiftly the years fly by! And you ask yourself again: what have you done with your best years, then? Where have you buried the best days of your life? Have you lived or not? Look, you tell yourself, look how cold the world is becoming. The years will pass and after them will come grim loneliness, and old age, quaking on its stick, and after them misery and despair. Your fantasy world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die, falling away like the yellow leaves from the tree? Ah, Nastenka! Will it not be miserable to be left alone, utterly alone, and have nothing even to regret? Nothing, not a single thing? Because everything I have lost was nothing, stupid, a round zero, all."

"You can be sincere and still be stupid."

"You cannot imagine the pain and anger take over you when great idea, which has long and highly respected, lookups bride and draw people into the street in front of dolts such as yourself, and suddenly find yourself in the oldness of the market, in the dirt, upside furnished, without proportion, without harmony-as a toy for children-unreasonable and cannot be more that is known"

"You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children."

"You cannot imagine what wrath and sadness overcome your whole soul when a great idea, which you have long cherished as holy, is caught up by the ignorant and dragged forth before fools like themselves into the street, and you suddenly meet it in the market unrecognizable, in the mud, absurdly set up, without proportion, without harmony, the plaything of foolish louts!"

"You cannot love the man but the welfare. Cannot he love in equal measure the suffering? It is not possible that the suffering will be as advantageous as welfare? The man puts up sometimes to love passionately suffering, that's a fact."

"You can't be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again."

"You don't need free will to determine that twice two is four. that's not what I call free will."

"You can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress. There's always a little corner which remains a secret to the world and is only known to those two."

"You have disgraced the name of Russia, madam! shouted the general, and there are police for that!"

"You have to stay away from each other as well as the poor unfortunate, so there will be exacerbated by each other. You caused her so much distress that had not felt had never before in modest hermit life. This worries, my soul Rout."

"You have to have a heart to understand!"

"You know what kind of man I think you are? You’re the kind of man who would stand there and smile at his torturers while they were tearing out his guts–if only he could find faith or a god."

"You know, gentlemen, that the mind is something excellent, and not in that of a doubt, but the mind is nothing more than the mind, which is not full, but the mentality of human nature, while the will is revealed for all life, any human life as a whole, including the mind and motives. Despite the fact that our lives, in this disclosure, often trivial, but it is still life, which is not in the simplicity of extracting square roots, I for example I want to live, to be in the possibility to satisfy all my means of life."

"You know, in my opinion, be funny and sometimes even good, and better, more can forgive each other and reconcile rather, not yet understood at once, not just a perfect start with, first, we did not understand much! And all too soon realize so perhaps not well understand."

"You know, my boy, he said, it's impossible to love men such as they are. And yet we must. So try to do good to men by doing violence to your feelings, holding your nose, and shutting your eyes, especially shutting your eyes. Endure their villainy without anger, as much as possible; try to remember that you're a man too. For, if you're even a little above average intelligence, you'll have the propensity to judge people severely. Men are vile by nature and they'd rather love out of fear. Don't give in to such love: despise it always."

"You know, when children are silent and proud, and they try to keep back their tears when they are in great trouble and suddenly break down, their tears fall in streams."

"You long for life and try to settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how tiresome, how insolent your outbursts are, and at the same time, how scared you are! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say imprudent things and are constantly afraid of them and apologizing for them. You declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to ingratiate yourself with us. You declare that you are gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may perhaps really have suffered, but you have no respect whatsoever for your own suffering. You may be truthful in what you have said but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest vanity you bring your truth to public exposure, to the market place, to ignominy."

"You fool with a heart and a crazy fool is as unhappy as a fool with a mind without a heart. The old truth…"