The Brothers Karamazov: My Top 30 Quotes

Sometime soon my thoughts about this most excellent book will formulate themselves into writing. But for now, (for the possibly two of you that might be interested) these are a handful of my favorite quotes from Dostoyevsky's classic.

             

 “You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness.” 

“There’s no proving (that there is life after death), though you can be convinced of it.”

“How?”
“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.” 

“What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself.” 

“But being in love doesn’t mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her. Remember that!”

“Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? 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.”

“Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all.”

“True security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.”

“’You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiplying your desires.’ That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants.”

“Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”

“Have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth.”

“At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things and there is nothing else like it.”

“I ponder ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. Once in infinite existence, immeasurable in time and space, a spiritual creature was given on his coming to earth, the power of saying, ‘I am and I love.’ Once, only once, there was given him a moment of active living love and for that was earthly life given him, and with it times and seasons. And that happy creature rejected the priceless gift, prized it and loved it not, scorned it and remained callous. Such a one, having left the earth, sees Abraham’s bosom and talks with Abraham as we are told in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and beholds heaven and can go up to the Lord. But that is just his torment, to rise up to the Lord without ever having loved, to be brought close to those who have loved when he has despised their love. For he sees clearly and says to himself, ‘Now I have understanding and though I now thirst to love, there will be nothing great, no sacrifice in my love, for my earthly life is over, and Abraham will not come even with a drop of living water (that is the gift of earthly, active life) to cool the fiery thirst of spiritual love which burns in me now, though I despised it on earth; there is no more life for me and will be no more time! Even though I would gladly give my life for others, it can never be, for that life is passed which can be sacrificed for love, and now there is a gulf fixed between that life and this existence.’”

 “One loves people for some reason, but what have either of you done for me?”
“You should love people without a reason, as Alyosha does.”

“You mustn’t ask too much of human endurance, one must be merciful . . . This soul is not yet at peace with itself, one must be tender with it . . .there may be a treasure in that soul . . .”

“Ah, that miracle! Ah, that sweet miracle! It was not men’s grief, but their joy Christ visited, He worked His first miracle to help men’s gladness . . . ‘He who loves men loves their gladness, too.’ . . . ‘There’s no living without joy,’”

“You have to deal with a man of honour, a man of the highest honour; above all—don’t lose sight of it—a man who’s done a lot of nasty things, but has always been, and still is, honourable at bottom, in his inner being. I don’t know how to express it. That’s just what’s made me wretched all my life, that I yearned to be honourable, that I was, so to say, a martyr to a sense of honour, seeking for it with a lantern, with the lantern of Diogenes and yet, all my life I’ve been doing filthy things like all of us, gentlemen.”

“In understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! But the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?”

“But it must not be supposed that his mind was preoccupied with his face and his height. On the contrary, however bitter the moments before the looking-glass were to him, he quickly forgot them, and forgot them for a long time, “abandoning himself entirely to ideas and to real life,” as he formulated it to himself.”

“These last two months I’ve found in myself a new man. A new man has risen up in me. He was hidden in me, but would never have come to the surface, if it hadn’t been for this blow from heaven. And what do I care if I spend twenty years in the mines, breaking out ore with a hammer? I am not a bit afraid of that—it’s something else I am afraid of now; that that new man may leave me. Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen hearts in that convict, on may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero!”

“O, yes, we shall be in chains and there will be no freedom, but then, in our great sorrow, we shall rise again to joy, without which man cannot live nor God exist, for God gives joy; it’s His privilege—a grand on. Ah, man should be dissolved in prayer! What should I be underground there without God? One cannot exist in prison without God; it’s even more impossible than out of prison. And then we men underground will sing from the bowels of the earth a glorious hymn to God, with Whom is joy. Hail to God and His joy! I love Him!”

“’What would a journal be without a column of criticism?’ Without criticism it would be nothing but one ‘hosannah.’ But nothing but hosanna is not enough for life, the hosannah must be tried in the crucible of doubt and so on, in the same style.”

“We are so accustomed to such crimes! That’s what’s so horrible, that such dark deeds have ceased to horrify us. What ought to horrify us is that we are so accustomed to it, and not this or that isolated crime. What are the causes of our indifference, our lukewarm attitude to such deeds, to such signs of the times, ominous of an unenviable future? Is it our cynicism, is it the premature exhaustion of intellect and imagination in a society that is sinking into decay, in spite of its youth? Is it that our moral principles are shattered to their foundations, or is it perhaps, a complete lack of such principles among us?”

“Why should we assume everything as we imagine it, as we make up our minds to imagine it? A thousand things may happen in reality which elude the subtlest imagination.”

“What is a father—a real father? What is the meaning of that great word? What is the great idea in that name?”

“I am not speaking only for the fathers here present, I cry aloud to all fathers: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.’ Yes, let us first fulfil Christ’s in junction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies and we have made them our enemies ourselves.”

“The father is not merely he who begets the child, but he who begets it and does his duty by it.”

“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. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education."

“Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest, and then let us never forget each other! I say that again. I give you my word for my part that I’ll never forget one of you. . . Let us all be generous and brave like Ilusha . . . Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our hearts from this time forth!”

“Don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!”

“Can it be true what’s taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?”

“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!”