[ The Brothers Karamazov — Fydor Dostoevsky ]

“There is among the people a silent, long-suffering

grief; it withdraws into itself and is silent. But
there is also a grief that is strained; a moment comes
when it breaks through with tears, and from that
moment on it pours itself out in lamentations.
Especially with women. But it is no easier to bear
than the silent grief. Lamentations ease the heart
only by straining and exacerbating it more and more.
Such grief does not even want consolation; it is
nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness.
Lamentations are simply the need to constantly
irritate the wound” (51).

“But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can

fall in love and still hate” (111).

“Why was I yearning for you, thirsting for you now,

all these days and now? … Why all these days? Because
I’ll tell you everything to you alone, because it’s
necessary, because you’re necessary, because tomorrow
I’ll fall from the clouds, because tomorrow life will
end and begin. Have you ever felt, have you ever
dreamed that you were falling off a mountain into a
deep pit? Well, I’m falling now, and not in a dream …
Let us praise nature: see how the sun shines, how
clear the sky is, the leaves are all green, it’s still
summer” (111).

“Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight

into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased
that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position,
and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very
shame I begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base
and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment
in which my God is clothed; let me be following the
devil at the same time, but still I am also your son,
Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which
the world cannot stand and be” (114).

Page 114, quoting Schiller:

“The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful
but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with
God, and the battlefield is the human heart” (115).

“But I cannot live any longer without telling you what

has been born in my heart, … But how shall I tell you
that which I want so much to tell you? Paper, they
say, does not blush, but I assure you that it is not
true, and that it is blushing now just as I am
blushing all over” (169).

“But you laugh like a little girl, and inside you

think like a martyr” (232).

Page 245:

“Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges

and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct
and honest” (251).
“There is, of course, a beast hidden in every man, a
beast of rage, a beast of sensual inflammability at
the cries of the tormented victim, an unrestrained
beast left off the chains, a beast of diseases
acquired in debauchery—gout, rotten liver, and so on”
(257).

“There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for

man, as long as he remains free, than to find someone
to bow down to as soon as possible. But man seeks to
bow down before that which is indisputable, so
indisputable that all men at once would agree to the
universal worship of it. For the care of these pitiful
creatures is not just to find something before which I
or some other man can bow down, but to find something
that everyone else will also believe in and bow down
to, for it must needs be all together. And this need
for communality of worship is the chief torment of
each man individually, and of mankind as a whole, from
the beginning of the ages. In the cause of universal
worship, they have destroyed each other with the
sword” (270).
“I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than
to find someone to whom he can quickly hand over that
gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is
born” (270).

“There is nothing more seductive for man than the

freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more
tormenting either” (271).

“Oh, we will convince them that they will only become

free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit
to us” (274).

“Fathers and teachers, I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’

And I answer thus: ‘The suffering of being no longer
able to love’” (342).