The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.
Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.
I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.
I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!
Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.
But people will laugh at all sorts of things.
You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid – and I know they are – yet I won’t be wiser?
If he’s alive he has everything in his power! Whose fault is it he doesn’t understand that.
That’s just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating – and then he eats you up.
Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
One can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan’t understand them thoroughly.
Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?
Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.
He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.
Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.
Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
Alyosha’s heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.
The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.