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Such power!" Adelaida cried all at once, peering greedily at the portrait over her sister's shoulder. "Where? What power?" Lizaveta Prokofyevna asked sharply. "Such beauty has power," Adelaida said hotly. "You can overturn the world with such beauty.
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The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three...And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere!
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God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.
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Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness.
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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 order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.
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Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.
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We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
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Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.
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What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.
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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!
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In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.
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Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
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To love another person is to see them as God intended them to be.
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To think too much is a disease.
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But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.
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The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.
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God knows what lives in me in place of me.
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I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
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Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.
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The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
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Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?
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... what you need more than anything in life is a definite position.
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if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me--even then I would have jumped!
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How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?