The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Quotes from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
- Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
- What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
- I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.
- The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
- I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.
- The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
- I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
- A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
- Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.