If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.
If there were no God, he would have to be invented.
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.
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.
And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.
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.
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
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.
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.
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
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.
Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
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 they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!
When I got into "Anna Karenina" and "Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment," that was the stuff that - that had a big effect on me, because it was so psychological.
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
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.
There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.
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.
In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.
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