“One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible.”

Doestovesky

The Grand Inquisitor

The second reason why I won’t speak of grown-up people is that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have compensation-they’ve eaten the apple and know good and evil, and have become “like gods.”  They go on eating it still.  But the children haven’t eaten anything, and are so far innocent.

Doestovesky

You know we prefer beating-rods and scourges- that’s our national institution.

Doestovesky

Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth.

Doestovesky

I don’t want to understand anything now.  I want to stick to the fact.

Doestovesky

I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong.  Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony;

The Grand Inquisitor

Doestovesky

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation.’

The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt

Let us return to the common man and his religion

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times;

One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out the bourgeois

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at most can defend themselves if they are attacked;

The present culture state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared

The religion of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind.  No one, needless to say who share a delusion ever recognizes it as such

There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved

A person who is born with a specially unfavorable instinctual constitution, and who has not properly undergone the transformation and rearrangement of his libidinal components which is indispensible foe later achievements, will find it hard to obtain happiness from his external situation, especially if he is faced with tasks of some difficulty.

I feel persuaded that by separating from the other matters contained in the New Testament, the moral precepts found in that book, these will be more likely to produce the desirable effect of improving the hearts and minds of men of different persuasions and degrees of understanding

Nothing is easier than to admits in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult at least I have found it so that constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.  Yet unless it is thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood.

With Cain, the first act of rebellion coincides with the first crime.

Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest now it as universal as a science.

The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito

And so away he goes, hurrying, searching.  Bit searching for what? Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him