If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. if I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your sins but the sins of others.
For why is gambling a whit worse than any other method of acquiring money? How, for instance, is it worse than trade? True, out of a hundred persons, only one can win; yet what business is that of yours or of mine?
A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal.
You know, in my opinion, being ridiculous is sometimes even a good thing, and better than that: we can forgive one another more quickly, and acquire humility more quickly; after all, we can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin directly from perfection! In order to achieve perfection, we must first of all fail to understand a great many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand very well.
If someone has a wart on their nose or their forehead, it really does seem that the only thing anyone in the world wants to do is to look at your wart, laugh at it and condemn you for it, even though you may have discovered America in the meanwhile.
Yes, universal history! It’s the study of the successive follies of mankind and nothing more.
Para que uno pueda amar a un hombre, es preciso que este hombre permanezca oculto. Apenas ve uno su rostro, el amor se desvanece.
Look how our young people commit suicide, without asking themselves Hamlet’s question what there is beyond, without a sign of such a question, as though all that relates to the soul and to what awaits us beyond the grave had long been erased in their minds and buried under the sands.
There’s the Holy Ghost and there’s the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can appear as other birds- sometimes as a swallow, sometimes a goldfinch and sometimes as a blue-tit.” “How do you know him from an ordinary tit?” “He speaks.” “How does he speak, in what language?” “Human language.” “And what does he tell you?” “Why, to-day he told me that a fool would visit me and would ask me unseemly questions. You.
Which is better a cheap happiness or lofty suffering? Tell me then, which is better?
There are cases when one may sometimes burn one’s ships and not go home again. Life does not consist only of lunches and dinners and prince S’s.
There are souls which, in their limitation, blame the whole world. But subdue such a soul with mercy, show it love, and it will cure its past, for there are many good impulses in it.
As a Russian proverb has it, ‘Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.
In fact, we have lost touch so badly that we often feel a kind of loathing for genuine ‘living live,’ and hence cannot endure being reminded of it. We’ve reached a point where we virtually regard ‘living life’ as hard labor, almost servitude and we all agree in private that it’s much better ’according to books.
This pleasure came precisely from being too clearly aware of your own degradation; from the feeling of having gone to the uttermost limits; that it is was vile, bit it could not have been otherwise; that you could not escape, you could never make yourself into a different person.
Suffering is life.
Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.
Even then I already carried the underground in my soul.
Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you that it’s not true and that it’s blushing now just as I am blushing all over.
Lord, but why don’t you go to this lawyer yourself and tell him the whole business in private? They say he was invited from Petersburg for three thousand.