Brothers Karamazov Quotes

I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.

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

Above all, don't lie to yourself.

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

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

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.

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

Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.

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.

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

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

Above all, do not lie to yourself.

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

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is The Brothers Karamazov.

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.

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

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

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

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.

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.