Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water.
Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that’s what you must do.
The high road is something very, very long, of which one cannot see the end – like human life, like human dreams. There is an idea in the open road, but what sort of idea is there in travelling with posting tickets? Posting tickets mean an end to ideas. Vive la grande route and then as God wills.
I suffered all evening, all night, I’m partly suffering now as well.
But I’m still curious to know: can you move a mountain or not?’ ‘If God commands it, I will move it,’ Tikhon pronounced with quiet restraint, again beginning to lower his eyes.
Realism that is limited to the end of one’s nose is more dangerous than the most insane fantasticality, because it’s blind.
But the greatness of it lies just in the fact that it is a mystery – that the passing earthly show and the eternal verity are brought together in it.
Easy as pie! Clever people get tripped up most easily on just such insignificant details. The cleverer a person is, the less he suspects that he’ll be tricked by something so simple. You have to trick the cleverest person with the simplest matter.
She fell on her knees before him as though in a sudden frenzy. “I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you, I knew that someone like you would come and forgive me. I believed that, nasty as I am, someone would really love me, not only with a shameful love!
He was one of that numerous and diverse legion of vulgarians, feeble miscreates, half-taught petty tyrants who make a point of instantly latching on to the most fashionable current idea, only to vulgarize it at once, to make an instant caricature of everything they themselves serve, sometimes quite sincerely.
So much have we lost touch with ‘real life’ that we occasionally feel a kind of disgust for it and so can’t bear to be reminded of it. For we have arrived at the point where we look on ‘real life’ as toil, almost as compulsory service, and all of us privately agree that ‘life’ as we find it in book is better.
Russia. I speak not only to fathers here, but to all fathers I cry out: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children!’ Let us first fulfill Christ’s commandment ourselves, and only then let us expect the same of our children.
Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.
You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.
What’s more certain than anything is that your pity is even stronger than my love!
Then I remembered about science and... shut up.
Aspiramos a cosas inconvenientes porque nuestra estupidez nos hace creer que pretendemos lo que nos conviene.
Already at the age of sixteen I wondered at them gloomily; I was amazed at the pettiness of their minds, the stupidity of their activities, games, and conversations. They were so lacking in understanding of the most essential things, so devoid of interest in the most important, most remarkable matters, that I involuntarily began to look upon them as my inferiors.
You have long needed a change of air. Suffering, too, is a good thing. Suffer! Maybe Nikolay is right in wanting to suffer. I know you don’t believe in it – but don’t be over-wise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
In my opinion, Christ’s love for people is in its kind a miracle impossible on earth. True, he was God. But we are not gods.