Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them.
They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners visits, carriages, rank, and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy.
I was positively astounded by the promptitude of this “Yes.” So the same thought may have been straying through her mind when she was staring at me just before. So she, too, was capable of certain thoughts? “Damn it all, this was interesting, this was a point of likeness!” I thought, almost rubbing my hands. And indeed it’s easy to turn a young soul like that!
I don’t praise him for taking bribes. I only say he is a nice man in his own way! But if one looks at men in all ways – are there many good ones left?
The criminal who revolted against society hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. In spite of different opinions, everyone will acknowledge that there are acts which everywhere and always, under no matter what legal system, are beyond doubt criminal, and should be regarded as long as man is man.
And if you weren’t a fool, a common fool, a perfect fool, if you were an original instead of a translation...
My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?
In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.
One cannot judge of crime with ready-made opinions: its philosophy is a little more complicated than people think. It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labour ever reformed a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offences he might commit.
Snegiryov, fussing and bewildered, ran after the coffin in his old, short, almost summer coat, bare-headed, with his old wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand. He was in some sort of insoluble anxiety, now reaching out suddenly to support the head of the coffin, which only interfered with the bearers, then running alongside to see if he could find a place for himself. A flower fell on the snow, and he simply rushed to pick it up, as if God knows what might come from the loss of this flower.
I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room and peeping through the crack in the screen. I was only insufferably oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted “peace,” to be left alone in my underground world. Real life oppressed me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.
Where is it that I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only got room to stand, with the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live like that than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live!
Roman Catholicism was not Christianity; you asserted that Rome proclaimed Christ subject to the third temptation of the devil. Announcing to all the world that Christ without an earthly kingdom cannot hold his ground upon earth, Catholicism by so doing proclaimed Antichrist and ruined the whole Western world.
Don’t quarrel with your bread and butter.” “They.
Is it because in my soul I’m just as much a murderer?” he asked himself. Something remote, but burning, stung his soul.
They even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid cannot meet on Earth, may perhaps meet somewhere in infinity.
He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia, who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once, and sometimes for ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterwards, as it were, in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them and half crushed them. In.
With tears of penitence and poignant, tender anguish, he will exclaim: ‘Others are better than I, they wanted to save me, not to ruin me!’ Oh, this act of mercy is so easy for you, for in the absence of anything like real evidence it will be too awful for you to pronounce: ‘Yes, he is guilty.
Money is a kind of freedom that can be felt and heard; it is an inestimable treasure for a man entirely deprived of true liberty.
He took a knife, and when his friend turned his back, he came up softly behind, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself, and saying earnestly – ‘God forgive me, for Christ’s sake!’ he cut his friend’s throat like a sheep, and took the watch.