Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself.
At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.
Don’t forget the small things, above all, don’t forget the small things – the smaller the trace, the more important it sometimes is.
Capitano a volte incontri con persone a noi assolutamente estranee, per le quali proviamo interesse fin dal primo sguardo, all’improvviso, in maniera inaspettata, prima che una sola parola venga pronunciata.
One who does not believe in God will not believe in God’s people. He who believes in God’s people will see His Holiness too, even though he had not believed in it till then. Only the people and their future spiritual power will convert our atheists, who have torn themselves away from their native soil.
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.
On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds you have sown, which perhaps you have already forgotten, will take root and grow; the one who has received from you will give to another. And how can you know what part you will play in the future resolution of the fates of mankind? If.
At first, right at the outset, yes, I did feel an urge, and I lapsed into great anxiety. I kept thinking all the time of how I was going to live; I wanted to test my fate, felt anxious particularly at certain moments.
And I could hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct debauchery of a clerk and have endured all the filthiness of it. What could have allured me about it then and have drawn me at night into the street? No, I had a lofty way of getting out of it all.
He seemed to be very dark-haired, lean, and swarthy; his eyes were large, undoubtedly black, very shiny, and had a yellow cast, like a Gypsy’s – that could be guessed even in the dark. He must have been about forty, and was not drunk.
But now we are either horrified at what we see or we pretend we are horrified, while in reality we relish the spectacle, as connoisseurs of strong and eccentric sensations that rouse us from our cynical and lazy apathy;.
This is my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness. Work, work unceasingly. Remember my words, for although I shall talk with you again, not only my days but my hours are numbered.
Disbelief in the devil is a French notion, a frivolous notion.
Five years of this Petersburg life went by, and, of course, during that time a great deal happened. Totski’s position was very uncomfortable; having “funked” once, he could not totally regain his ease. He was afraid, he did not know why, but he was simply afraid of Nastasia Philipovna.
And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.
For a hundred versts around there was perhaps not a single person, beginning with himself, who bore even the remotest resemblance to a future member of ‘mankind’s universal social republic and harmony’.
So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions, and finding a kind of enjoyment in it.
As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose.
Now mark this, prince – there is nothing so offensive to a man of our time and race than to be told that he is wanting in originality, that he is weak in character, has no particular talent, and is, in short, an ordinary person.
What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead. Well, and this wanting, the devil knows...