Best Brothers Karamazov Quotes

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.

There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.

Above all, do not lie to yourself.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

I just can’t imagine my life without Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. I can spin off of that and talk about Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy. I could talk about other novels, but for me it’s Dostoevsky. His sheer size and grandeur, his sacramentality, his ecclesiology, and his sense of the human predicament are as powerful as it gets. Can’t imagine not reading the Russians.

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

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.

Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?…No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people’s expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it–you’ll find that a bit harder.

Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.

It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.

People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.

Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?

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.

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.

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 heart in that convict, one 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! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. […] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.

If there were no God, he would have to be invented.

I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays & the soft tender gentle memories that come with them…’ -Father Zossima

Love life more than the meaning of it?

My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.

Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!

This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself.