You mustn’t think to embarrass them with your witnessing, Your Excellency; they won’t be embarrassed.
Sometimes she put that question to her husband, and, as usual, she asked it hysterically, threateningly, expecting an immediate reply.
Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.
People are very varied: some change their feelings easily, others with difficulty.
It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact.
But maybe there isn’t any God.
Money equalizes all inequalities.
There were rats in it, but Fyodor Pavlovich was not altogether angry with them:.
I’ll always come to see you, all my life,” Alyosha answered firmly.
I am X in an indeterminate equation.
Take a soldier and put him right in front of a cannon in a battle and fire it at him, and he’ll go on hoping, but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier, and he’ll go mad, or start to weep.
If it can’t be decided in the affirmative, it will never be decided in the negative. You know that that is the peculiarity of your heart, and all its suffering is due to it. But thank the Creator who has given you a lofty heart capable of such suffering; of thinking and seeking higher things, for our dwelling is in the heavens. God grant that your heart will attain the answer on earth, and may God bless your path.
For suffering, Rodion Romanovitch, is a great thing.
The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction!
And how they set me up in court! They really set me up!” “Even if they hadn’t set you up, you’d have been convicted anyway,” Alyosha said, sighing. “Yes, the local public is sick of me!
There are three Powers, three unique Forces upon earth, capable of conquering for ever by charming the conscience of these weak rebels – men – for their own good; and these Forces are: Miracle, Mystery and Authority.
Not infrequently it turns out that a writer whom people have long credited with an extraordinary depth of ideas whom they have expected to exert an extraordinary and major influence on the direction of society, displays in the end such a watered down and minuscule version of his basic little idea that no one is even sorry that he’s succeeded in writing himself out.
And how many ideas there have been on earth in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared! Yet when their destined hour had come, they came forth and spread over the whole earth. So it will be with us, and our people will shine forth in the world, and all men will say: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone of the building.
You wanted to make yourself another man by suffering. I say, only remember that other man always, all your life and wherever you go;.
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.