When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man.
Does it matter whether it was a dream or a reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?
I love humanity,’ he said, ’but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development.
I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine.
You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate.
He proposes, as a final solution to the question, the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth is to receive personal freedom and unlimited rights over the remaining nine-tenths.6.
But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.
When you choose an elder, you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete.
It’s your rich life,” Alyosha said softly. “Why, is it better to be poor?” “Yes, it is.
He entered a confectioner’s shop to rest, once. He was in a state of nervous excitement and perturbation; he noticed nothing and no one; and he felt a craving for solitude, to be alone with his thoughts and his emotions, and to give himself up to them passively. He loathed the idea of trying to answer the questions that would rise up in his heart and mind. “I am not to blame for all this,” he thought to himself, half unconsciously.
I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you already because of the lies I had told you. Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I’d sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea.
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic.
I grieve for my little son, father, for my little son.
Truth with love is a lie.
Railroads have eaten up all the capital and covered Russia like spiderwebs, so that perhaps in another fifteen years or so one may even be able to take a ride somewhere. Bridges burn only rarely, while towns burn down regularly, in established order, by turns, during the fire seasons.
He said that those five minutes seemed to him an infinite length of time, an immense richness; it seemed to him that during those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point in thinking about the last moment yet, so he made various allocations: he calculated the time he needed to say goodbye to his companions, and allotted some two minutes to it, then he allotted another two minutes to think about himself for the last time, and then look around him for the last time. He.
And a respectable man must be a coward and a slave not only at the present time, owing to some accidental circumstances, but generally in all periods of time. That’s a law of nature for all respectable people on earth.
Better that you enslave us, but feed us.
Considered alone, the railways will not pollute the springs of life, but as a whole they are accursed. The whole tendency of our latest centuries, in its scientific and materialistic aspect, is most probably accursed.