Lev Shestov Quotes

One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely.

He did not want to be original; he made superhuman efforts to be like everybody else: but there is no escaping one's destiny.

Whether I am believed or not, I will repeat that Vladimir Soloviov, who held that Dostoevsky was a prophet, is wrong, and that N. K. Mikhailovsky, who calls him a cruel talent and a grubber after buried treasure, is right. Dostoevsky grubs after buried treasure no doubt about that. And, therefore, it would be more becoming in the younger generation that still marches under the flag of pious idealism if, instead of choosing him as a spiritual leader, they avoided the old sorcerer, in whom only those gifted with great shortsightedness or lack of experience in life could fail to see the dangerous man.

Art, science, love, inspiration, ideals - choose out all the words with which humanity is wont, or has been in the past, to be consoled or to be amused - Chekhov has only to touch them and they instantly wither and die. And Chekhov himself faded, withered and died before our eyes. Only his wonderful art did not die - his art to kill by a mere touch, a breath, a glance, everything whereby men live and wherein they take their pride. And in this art he was constantly perfecting himself, and he attained to a virtuosity beyond the reach of any of his rivals in European literature.

The man of science, whether he knows it or not (most often, obviously, he does know it), whether he wishes it or not (ordinarily he does not wish it), cannot help but be a realist in the medieval sense of the term. He is distinguished from the philosopher only by the fact that the philosopher must, in addition, explain and justify the realism practiced by science

To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Chekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Chekhov was doing one alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes. Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his creation. Hitherto it has been little spoken of. The reasons are quite intelligible. In ordinary language what Chekhov was doing is called crime, and is visited by condign punishment. But how can a man of talent be punished?

A thread from everyone, and the naked will have a shirt." There is no beggar but has his thread of cotton, and he will not grudge it to a naked man - no, nor even to a fully dressed one; but will bestow it on the first comer. The poor, who want to forget their poverty, are very ready with their threads. Moreover, they prefer to give them to the rich, rather than to a fellow-tramp. To load the rich with benefits, must not one be very rich indeed? That is why fame is so easily got.

Count Tolstoy preached inaction. It seems he had no need. We "inact" remarkably. Idleness, just that idleness Tolstoy dreamed of, a free, conscious idling that despises labour, this is one of the chief characteristics of our time.

If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe themselves in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not suffice Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world.

Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour, - this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. Genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself - the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job.

Whilst stay-at-home persons are searching for truth, the apple will stay on the tree.

But it will be asked: What is the force and power of the blessings and curses of men, even if these men be such giants as Plato and Aristotle? Does truth become more true because Aristotle blesses it, or does it become error because Plato curses it? Is it given men to judge the truths, to decide the fate of the truths? On the contrary, it is the truths which judge men and decide their fate and not men who rule over the truths. Men, the great as well as the small, are born and die, appear and disappear - but the truth remains. When no one had as yet begun to "think" or to "search," the truths which later revealed themselves to men already existed. And when men will have finally disappeared from the face of the earth, or will have lost the faculty of thinking, the truths will not suffer therefrom.

It is obvious that he has set himself an impossible task; slow and gradual transformations are possible, they even happen quite frequently, but they do not lead us to a new life; they only take us from one old life to another old life. The new life always makes itself known abruptly, without any approach or preparation, and it keeps its strange enigmatical character in the midst of events whose course has been determined by the old laws.

It is necessary to choose: if you wish to be an empiricist, you must abandon the hope of founding scientific knowledge on a solid and certain basis; if you wish to have a solidly established science, you must place it under the protection of the idea of Necessity and, in addition, recognize this idea as primordial, original, having no beginning and consequently no end - that is to say, you must endow it with the superiorities and qualities that men generally accord to the S

More striking still, a broken man is generally deprived of everything except the ability to acknowledge and feel his position.

Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes' clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness).

But strange though it may seem, the more he judged, and the more he realized that men feared and acknowledged his right to judge, the more his innermost soul questioned man's right to judgment of any kind.

The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty... not to reassure him, but to upset him.

Herein lies the supreme wisdom, human and divine; and the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.

The story of a regeneration of convictions - can any story in the entire field of literature be more filled with thrilling and all-absorbing interest?

Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.

Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his "premonitions." The world would remain for him, "in the light" of our "positive" sciences, what it was - a dark and sorrowful subterranean region - and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality." [1] In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it.

Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness.

But nobody has ever yet called a philosopher "a hired conscience," though everybody gives the lawyer this nickname. Why this partiality?

Dostoevsky does not believe his own words, and he is trying to replace a lack of faith with "feeling" and eloquence.

Moral people are the most revengeful of mankind, they employ their morality as the best and most subtle weapon of vengeance. They are not satisfied with simply despising and condemning their neighbour themselves, they want the condemnation to be universal and supreme: that is, that all men should rise as one against the condemned, and that even the offender's own conscience shall be against him. Then only are they fully satisfied and reassured. Nothing on earth but morality could lead to such wonderful results.

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep.

If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.

St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.

Practical advice. - People who read much must always keep it in mind that life is one thing, literature another. Not that authors invariably lie. I declare that there are writers who rarely and most reluctantly lie. But one must know how to read, and that isn't easy. Out of a hundred bookreaders ninety-nine have no idea what they are reading about. It is a common belief, for example, that any writer who sings of suffering must be ready at all times to open his arms to the weary and heavy-laden. This is what his readers feel when they read his books. Then when they approach him with their woes, and find that he runs away without looking back at them, they are filled with indignation and talk of the discrepancy between word and deed. Whereas the fact is, the singer has more than enough woes of his own, and he sings them because he can't get rid of them. L'uccello canta nella gabbia, non di gioia ma di rabbia, says the Italian proverb: "The bird sings in the cage, not from joy but from rage." It is impossible to love sufferers, particularly hopeless sufferers, and whoever says otherwise is a deliberate liar. "Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." But you remember what the Jews said about Him: "He speaks as one having authority!" And if Jesus had been unable, or had not possessed the right, to answer this skeptical taunt, He would have had to renounce His words. We common mortals have neither divine powers nor divine rights, we can only l

This Aristotle knew definitely: the truth has the power to force or constrain men, all men alike, whether it be the great Parmenides and the great Alexander or Parmenides' unknown slave and the least of Alexander's stable-men

They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad. This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.

If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. He would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does Schiller's, or Dostoevsky's, or even Socrates', whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie.

To praise oneself is considered improper, immodest; to praise one's own sect, one's own philosophy, is considered the highest duty.