1. “Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity.”
2. “I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
3. “Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.”
4. “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
5. “The sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices”
6. “By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”
7. “He is guilty, but he will be acquitted, from motives of humanity, in accordance with the new ideas, the new sentiments that had come into fashion,”
8. “Being in love doesn’t mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.”
9. “Love life more than the meaning of it?”
10. “If 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. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral; everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”
11. “I owe them nothing now, and owe no one anything for ever. They are wicked and I will be wicked. They are cruel and I will be cruel.”
12. “But as soon as he had uttered his foolish tirade, he felt he had been talking absurd nonsense, and at once longed to prove to his audience, and above all to himself, that he had not been talking nonsense.”
13. “Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them.”
14. “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.”
15. “Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.”
16. “For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
17. “I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.”
18. “Brother, I’m not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter – this is what life is, herein lies its task.”
19. “Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
20. “You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it?”
21. “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.”
22. “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”
23. “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
24. “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.”
25. “Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.”
26. “You mustn’t ask too much of human endurance, one must be merciful.”
27. “If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. if I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your sins but the sins of others.”
28. “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.”
29. “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
30. “Forgive me… for my love – for ruining you with my love.”
31. “For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”
32. “Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.”
33. “Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and be not consoled, but weep.”
34. “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!“
35. “I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.”
36. “As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.”
37. “This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.”
38. “Never trust a woman’s tears, Alyosha. I am never for the woman in such cases. I am always on the side of the men.”
39. “I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon; so I say let me play the buffoon, for you are, every one of you, stupider and lower than I.”
40. “Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.”
41. “How good life is when one does something good and just!”
42. “I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.”
43. “I may be wicked, but still I gave an onion.”
44. “When i look around me, i realize that people don’t care, hardly anyone does, and i’m the only one who cannot bear it. It is dreadful, just dreadful!”
45. “but a real punishment, the only real, the only frightening and appeasing punishment, which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience.”
46. “I wanted to tell you of a longing I have. I should like some one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and go away. I don’t want to be happy.” “You are in love with disorder?”
47. “Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their suffering.”
48. “Go, then, and do not be afraid. Do not be upset with people, do not take offense at their wrongs. Forgive the dead man in your heart for all the harm he did you; be reconciled with him truly. If you are repentant, it means that you love. And if you love, you already belong to God … With love everything is bought, everything is saved. If even I, a sinful man, just like you, was moved to tenderness and felt pity for you, how much more will God be. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go, and do not be afraid.”
49. “The monks used to say that he was more drawn to those who were more sinful, and the greater the sinner the more he loved him.”
50. “All is lawful.”
51. “Love it, regardless of logic as you say. It must be regardless of logic.”
52. “I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves in spring. I love the blue sky. I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them. Yet from habit one’s heart prizes them.”
53. “It’s always worthwhile speaking to a clever man.”
54. “The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”
55. “It’s easier going to the other world if one knows what there is there.”
56. “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”
57. “There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.”
58. “Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!“
59. “for the lawyers, who cared not about the moral aspect of the case, but only, so to speak, about its contemporary legal aspect.”
60. “We don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”
61. “But their childish delight will end; it will cost them dear. But they will see at last, the foolish children, that, though they are rebels, they are impotent rebels, unable to keep their own rebellion.”
62. “My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.”
63. “I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!”
64. “Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.”
65. “You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”
66. “Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window,”
67. “Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you.”
68. “What is the use of Christ’s words, unless we set an example?”
69. “Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you — and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!”
70. “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. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
71. “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.”
72. “In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden-the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain”
73. “It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.”
74. “The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
75. “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”
76. “Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.”
77. “Don’t be afraid of life. How good life is when one does somethings good and just.”
78. “Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart, even when he said: “I do not believe till I see”.”
79. “Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”
80. “Everything passes, only truth remains.”
81. “He doesn’t have so much learning…or any special education either; he’s silent, and he grins at you silently–that’s how he gets by.”
82. “But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.”
83. “Oh, God and all the rest of it.”
“What, don’t you believe in God?”
“Oh, I’ve nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis, but . . . I admit that He is needed . . . for the order of the universe and all that . . . and that if there were no God He would have to be invented,” added Kolya, beginning to blush.”
84. “There is something spiteful and yet open-hearted about you”
85. “That makes it worse! Worse and better!”
86. “It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.”
87. “Everything is permitted…”
88. “If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.”
89. “Those innocent eyes cut my soul like a razor…however, in a depraved man this, too, might be only a sensual attraction.”
90. “Prayer is an education.”
91. “You wanted to make yourself another man by suffering. I say, only remember that other man always, all your life and wherever you go;”
92. “I remember once I came into his room alone, when no one was with him. It was a bright evening, the sun was setting and lit up the whole room with its slanting rays. He beckoned when he saw me, I went over to him, he took me by the shoulders with both hands, looked tenderly, lovingly into my face; he did not say anything, he simply looked at me like that for about a minute: “Well,” he said, “go now, play, live for me!” I walked out then and went to play.”
93. “If anything could dissipate my love to humanity, it would be ingratitude. In short, I am a hired servant, I expect my payment at once—that is, praise, and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I am incapable of loving any one.”
94. “Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.”
95. “I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me.”
96. “Precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the hearth knows how to find what is precious”
97. “… 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.”
98. “For the secret of human existence lies not only in living, but in knowing what to live for.”
99. “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end… 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? Tell me, and tell me the truth!“
100. “They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.”
101. “My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.”
102. “Man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower.”
103. “This is something about which You were right. For the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for. Without a concrete idea of what he is living for, man would refuse to live, would rather exterminate himself than remain on this earth, even if bread were scattered all around him.”
104. “To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.”
105. “I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly.”
106. “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
107. “Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.”
108. “He was so carried away by his simulated emotion, that he was for one moment almost believing it himself.”
109. “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.”
110. “I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
111. “There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love, and it will curse what it has done, for there are so many germs of good in it. The soul will expand and behold how merciful God is, and how beautiful and just people are. He will be horrified, he will be overwhelmed with repentance and the countless debt he must henceforth repay.”
112. “Fancy pants, the monk can dance!”
113. “The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straight forward.”
114. “You will behold great sorrow, and in this sorrow be happy.”
115. “In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.”
116. “Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously.”
117. “… 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 eveyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.”
118. “Young man, do not forget to pray. Each time you pray, if you do so sincerely, there will be the flash of a new feeling in it, and a new thought as well, one you did not know before, which will give you fresh courage; and you will understand that prayer is education.”
119. “There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant!”
120. “If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s human, he’ll murder; if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive.”
121. “I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there – that is living.”
122. “Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.”
123. “He longed to revenge himself on every one for his own unseemliness.”
124. “Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.”
125. “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go, and do not be afraid.”
126. “I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.”
127. “I love mankind, he said, “but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
128. “I’ll always come to see you, all my life,” Alyosha answered firmly.”
129. “When you choose an elder, you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete”
130. “The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.”
131. “Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.”
132. “With such a hell in your heart and your head, how can you live? How can you love?”
133. “Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.”
134. “The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars …”
135. “Loving someone is different from being in love with someone. You can hate someone you’re in love with.”
136. “In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.”
137. “For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.”
138. “Every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”
139. “people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.”
140. “I grieve for my little son, father, for my little son.”
141. “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.”
142. “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.”
143. “And how are the other weak ones to blame, because they could not endure what the strong have endured?”
144. “Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness. And if two of you are gathered together – then there is a whole world, a world of living love. Embrace each other tenderly and praise God, for if only in you two His truth has been fulfilled.”
145. “He was well aware of his own considerable abilities, and nervously exaggerated them in his self-conceit.”
146. “Man is broad, too broad. I’d have him narrower.”
147. “The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.”
148. “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. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying–to others and to yourself.”
149. “There is among the people a silent, long-suffering grief; it withdraws into itself and is silent.”
150. “They were like two enemies in love with one another.”
151. “If anything is wrong with your nose, they send you to Paris: there, they say, is a European specialist who cures noses. If you go to Paris, he’ll look at your nose; I can only cure your right nostril, he’ll tell you, for I don’t cure the left nostril, that’s not my speciality, but go to Vienna, there there’s a specialist who will cure your left nostril.”
152. “Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.”
153. “I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.”
154. “Hesitation, anxiety, the struggle between belief and disbelief—all that is sometimes such a torment for a conscientious man… that it’s better to hang oneself.”
155. “A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.”
156. “But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.”
157. “One can fall in love and still hate.”