An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life—becoming a better person.
And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat.
It is amazing how complete the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Even in the best, most friendly, and simple relations of life, praise and commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary for wheels that they may run smoothly.
We call beauty that which supplies us with particular pleasure.
Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone’s will and the execution of that will by others.
But that had been grief—this was a joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.
We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.
Nowadays, as before, the public declaration and confession of Orthodoxy is usually encountered among dull-witted, cruel, and immoral people who tend to consider themselves very important. Whereas intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good-naturedness, and morality are qualities usually found among people who claim to be non-believers.
Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on everyone) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of the home and foreign expediency.
I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.
What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.
And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stephan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.
There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before…
If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.
The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts – that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives. Evidently, salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth; It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders – it can only be remedied by a change of life.
Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.
There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.
The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.
I felt a wish never to leave that room – a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.
True art and true science possess two unmistakable marks: the first, an inward mark, which is this, that the servitor of art and science will fulfill his vocation, not for profit but with self-sacrifice; and the second, an external sign, his productions will be intelligible to all the people whose welfare he has in view.
Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people—that’s in your hands.
The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?
She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.
Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.
The botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.
Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.
The workmen’s revolution, with the terrors of destruction and murder, not only threatens us, but we have already been living upon its verge during the last thirty years, and it is only by various cunning devices that we have been postponing the crisis… The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.
Some teachers of mankind — as Plato… the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists — have gone so far as to repudiate art….[They consider it] so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art…. such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied — one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist…. Now there is only fear, lest we should be deprived of any pleasures art can afford, so any type of art is patronized. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling — this is the activity of art.
I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.
The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness.
Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and at home, the very walls are supported.
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
Perhaps it is even more important to know what one should not think about than what one should think about.
I wanted to run after him but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one’s wife’s lover in one’s socks, and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.
It is heavenly when I overcome my earthly desires but nevertheless when I’m not successful, It can also be quite pleasurable.
It seems as though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached love and forgiveness of injuries—and that men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another.