Sublime

In my opinion, Christ’s love for people is in its kind a miracle impossible on earth.

Dmitri Karamazov. And because it expresses so clearly the “irrational” value of life and the purifying effect of suffering, central themes of Dostoevsky’s later work, which he knew first of all from experience.

It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most. . . . But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing.

The Lord God can’t take some Tartar by the neck and claim that he, too, was a Christian?

For the mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him.

precisely the type of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well—one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else.