Sacrifice of life, in many cases, is the easiest of all sacrifices.And that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal, such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.
Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was always of a voluptuous temper, and ready to run after any petticoat on the slightest encouragement.
Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly playing an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so, and even to his own direct disadvantage.This habit is a characteristic of great many number of people,some of them very clever ones.
He would have probably succeeded, merely from her moral fatigue and desire to get rid of him, and from the contempt and loathing he aroused by his persistent and shameless importunity.
(Of Adelaida): she was a hot-tempered, bold, dark-browed, impatient woman, possessed of remarkable physical strength.
As a general rule,people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
He gathered that the young man was frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and dissipated, and that if he could only obtain ready money he would be satisfied, although only, of course, a short time.
He had not reckoned on a dowry:what allured him was the remarkable beauty of the innocent girl, above all her innocent appearance, which had a peculiar attraction for a profligate, who had hitherto admired only the coarser types of feminine beauty.
These paragraphs, were so interesting and piquant that they were soon taken. This alone showed the young man’s practical and intelluctual superiority over the masses of needy and unfortunate students of both the sexes who hang about the offices of the newspapers and the journals, unable to think of anything better than everlasting entreaties for copying and tranlsations from the French.
(Of Alyosha) : He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of the worldly wickedness to the light of love.
Such memories may persist, as everyone knows, from an even earlier age, even from two years old, but scarcely standing out through a whole lifetime like spots of light out of darkness,like a corner torn out of a huge picture, which was all faded and disappeared except that fragment.
Boys, pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak.
my young man was a sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed creature,a pale, consumptive dreamer.But he was very thoughtful and apparently very serene.
Faith does not spring from miracles but miracles from faith.
Youth of our last epoch,honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it.
For socialism is not merely the labour question,it is before all things the atheist question,the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the Tower of Babel built without God,not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.
An elder was one who took your soul, your will, into his soul and his will. when you choose an elder, you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete self-abnegation.
Possibly his youthful imagination was deeply stirred by the power and fame of the elder.
He understood that for the humble soul of the russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil,and still more by the everlasting injustice and everlasting sin,his own and the world’s,it was the greatest need and comfort to find someone or something holy to fall down before and worship.
Man loves to see the downfall and the disgrace of the righteous.
Zossima: Multiplication of the desires:In the rich,leads to isolation and spiritual suicide and in the poor to envy and murder;for they have been given rights but not the means of satisfying them.
Z: Things that a child needs: sunshine, childish play, good examples all about him and atleast a little love.
Z: It is impossible that there should be no servants in the world, but act so that your servant may be freer in spirit than if he were not a servant.
The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone of the building.
Z: Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals;they are without sin, and you, with all your greatness,defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you-
Dost: He was unmistakably a man driven into a corner, on the brink of ruin, catching at the last straw, ready to sink if he failed.(about Mitya)
what terrible tragedies real life throws at people.
Profound dejection clung about his soul like a heavy mist./ Profound lightness lingered about his soul like a feather.
And to think, only to think that a man’s life should be ruined for the sake of that paltry three thousand roubles
(of Mitya) He was that sort of jealous man who, in the absense of the beloved woman,at once invents all sorts of awful fantasies of what may be happening to her, and how she may be betraying him, but , when shaken, heart-broken, convinced of her faithlessness, he runs back to her, at the first glance at her face, her gay, laughing affectionate face, he revives at once, lays aside all suspicion and with joyful shame abuses himself for his jealousy.
It is impossibel to picture to oneself the shame and moral degradation to which the jealous man can descend without a qualm of conscience.
And one might wonder what there is in a love that had to be so watched over, and a love could be worth that needed such strenuous guarding.
And, as we all know, one can’t take a step without money.
When he is sober, he is a fool; and when he is drunk, he is wise.
Lise( to Alyosha) : Why live in real life? It’s better to dream. One can dream the most delightful things but real life is a bore.
For if there is no everlasting God, there is no such thing as virtue and there is also no need of it.
I think, therefore I am.
(of the officials in Jury ): Except one who was younger, they were grey-headed men, little known in society,who had vegetated on a pitiful salary, and who probably had pitiful unpresentable wives and crowds of children, perhaps even without shoes and stocking.
His confidence and self-relaince were unmistakable.
He was as obstinate as a mule.
(of Gurushenka): she was simply irritated and painfully conscious of the contemptuous and inqusitive eyes of the scandal-loving public. She was proud and could not stand contempt.She was one of those people who flare up, angry and eager to retaliate, at the mere suggestion of contempt.
(of Katya): She had loved him with hysterical, “lacerated” love only from pride, from wounded pride, and that love was not like love but more like revenge.
(of Mitya): He is spontaneous, he is a marvelling mingling of good and evil,he is a lover of culture and Schiller,yet he brawls in taverns and plucks out the beards of his boon companions.Oh, he, too, can be good and noble, but only when all goes well with him. What is more, he can be carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet by noble ideals, but only if they come off themselves, only if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for.He dislikes paying for anything but is fond of receiving,and that’s so with him in everything.Oh, give him every possible good in life(he couldn’t be content with less), and put no obstacles in his way,and he will show that, he, too, can be noble. He is not greedy, no, but he must have money, a great deal of money, and you will see how genereously, with what wcorn of filthy lucre,he will fling it all away in the reckless dissipation of one night. But if he has not money, he will show what he is ready to do to get it when he is great need of it.
(of Karamazovs): the sense of their own degradation is as essential to those reckless and unbridled natures as the sense of their lofty generosity.
(od Mitya): He likes to tell his companions everything, even his most diabolical and dangerous ideas;he likes to share every thought with others,and expects, for some reason, that those he confides in will meet him with perfect sympathy,enter into all his troubles and anxieties, take his part and not oppose him in anything.If not, he flies into rage and smashes up everything in the tavern.
(of criminals) : On one moment, they will show diabolial cunninng, while another will escape them altogether.
