Dostoevsky – is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.
So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.
The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one’s consciousness from its primary source.
The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.
Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.
I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly.
In creativity the way will be found for subject to pass into object, the identity of subject with object will be restored. All the great creators have foreseen this turning-point. Today, in the depths of culture itself and in all its separate spheres, this crisis of creativity is ripening.
We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.
In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.
It is imperative to bear in mind that human creativity is not a claim or a right on the part of man, but God’s claim on and call to man. God awaits man’s creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God.
Creativeness is liberation from slavery. Man is free when he finds himself in a state of creative activity. Creativeness leads to ecstasy of the moment. The products of creativeness are within time, but the creative act itself lies outside time.
Creativity is the mystery of freedom.
True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness of congealing self-perfection.
Denial of Russia in the name of humanity it is – robbing humanity.
Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.
Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
God is a reality of spirit He cannot be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.
The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia’s existence.
We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.