Super Quotes #94 : Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Truly,' I answered him, 'all things are good and fair, because all is truth. Look,' said I, 'at the horse, that great beast that is so near to man; or the lowly, pensive ox, which feeds him and works for him; look at their faces, what meekness, what devotion to man, who often beats them mercilessly. What gentleness, what confidence and what beauty! It's touching to know that there's no sin in them, for all, all except man, is sinless, and Christ has been with them before us.
...we are of a broad, Karamazovian nature--and this is what I am driving at--capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, and abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation.
My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman who brought no good to anyone, to murder whom would pardon forty sins, who sucked the lifeblood of the poor, and you call that a crime ?
It wasn't you I was bowing to, but the whole of human suffering.
Don't be like everyone else, even if you are the only one.
I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment.
Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.
You cannot imagine what wrath and sadness overcome your whole soul when a great idea, which you have long cherished as holy, is caught up by the ignorant and dragged forth before fools like themselves into the street, and you suddenly meet it in the market unrecognizable, in the mud, absurdly set up, without proportion, without harmony, the plaything of foolish louts!
And I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation, higher than chemistry, higher than almost all mankind, for they are already the fruit, the real fruit of all mankind, and maybe the highest fruit there ever may be! A form of beauty already achieved, without the achievement of which I might not even consent to live...
وحين يمتلئ قلب فتاة بالشفقة انما تتعرض لأكبر خطر. فهى تريد حتما أن تنقذ، أن ترد إلى الصواب، أن تحيى،
أن تبعث... أن تفعل كل ما يمكن تخيله على هذا النمط من المعاني. وسرعان ما أدركت أن الطائر الصغير قد يطير إلى الشبكة من تلقاء نفسه
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3137322.Fyodor_Dostoyevsky?page=41