We are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded o...
How anxiously I yearned for those I had forsaken.
It is precisely that requirement of worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal...
We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.
Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare
You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.
We've already had , the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one of these...
There's something here, my dear boy, that you don't understand yet. A man will fall in love with some beauty, with a woman's body, or even a part of a woman's body (a sensualist can understand that) a...
The world says: You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more. This is the worldly...
The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return t...
For, having begun to build their Tower of Babel without us, they will end in anthropophagy. And it is then that the beast will come crawling to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of bloo...
Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force...
My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking? To be sure, I won't break through such a wall with my f...
Listen! I know it's not right to talk. Better to set an example, better to just start - I have already started - and - and can one really be unhappy? Oh, what do my grief and my misfortune matter if I...
Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers.
Видишь, я тогда все се-бя спрашивал: зачем я так глуп, что если другие глу-пы и коли я знаю уж наверно, что они глупы, то самне хочу быть умнее? Потом я узнал, Соня, что еслиждать, пока все станут умн...
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.
I don't know whether the spider perhaps does not hate the fly he has marked and is snaring. Dear little fly! It seems to me that the victim is loved, or at least may be loved. Here I love my enemy. I...
During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written.
People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.