Karamazov Quotes

Irrational crime and rational crime, in fact, both equally betray the value brought to light by the
movement of rebellion. Let us first consider the former. He who denies everything and assumes the
authority to kill - Sade, the homicidal dandy, the pitiless Unique, Karamazov, the zealous supporters of
the unleashed bandit - lay claim to nothing short of total freedom and the unlimited display of human
pride. Nihilism confounds creator and created in the same blind fury. Suppressing every principle of hope,
it rejects the idea of any limit, and in blind indignation, which no longer is even aware of its reasons, ends
with the
conclusion that it is a matter of indifference to kill when the victim is already condemned to death. ~ Albert Camus

Karamazov, we love you! a voice, which seemed to be Kartashov's, exclaimed irrepressibly. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

But how do you see you?" she asked.
"Ever read The Brothers Karamazov?" I asked.
"Once, a long time ago."
"Well, toward the end, Alyosha is speaking to a young student named Kolya Krasotkin. And he says, Kolya, you're going to have a miserable future. But overall, you'll have a happy life."
Two beers down, I hesitated before opening my third.
"When I first read that, I didn't know what Alyosha meant," I said. "How was it possible for a life of misery to be happy overall? But then I understood, that misery could be limited to the future."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Neither do I," I said. "Not yet. ~ Haruki Murakami

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

By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow," Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother's words, "told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them- all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of 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.
These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers' eyes. Doing it before the mothers' eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. A ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That day was turning out to be longer than The Brothers Karamazov. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Then it happened. One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life. I held his book in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, and of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence. Dostoyevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler. He turned me inside out. I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons. The hatred for my father melted. I loved my father, poor, suffering, haunted wretch. I loved my mother too, and all my family. It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world. I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write.
The week before I left town the draft board summoned me to Sacramento for my physical. I was glad to go. Someone other than myself could make my decisions. The army turned me down. I had asthma. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes.
"That's nothing. I've always had it."
"See your doctor."
I got the needed information from a medical book at the public library. Was asthma fatal? It could be. And so be it. Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, I had asthma. To write well a man must have a fatal ailment. It was the only way to deal with the presence of death. ~ John Fante

Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Your slave and enemy,
D.Karamazov ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The most pure form of the movement of rebellion is thus crowned with the heart-rending cry
of Karamazov: if all are not saved, what good is the salvation of one only? ~ Albert Camus

Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, 'love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams' (The Brothers Karamazov). ~ Peter Kreeft

It's like this,' began the elder. 'All these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons, and formerly with flogging, too, do not reform anyone and, what's more, scarcely deter even one criminal, and, far from diminishing, the number of crimes are steadily increasing. You have to admit that. It therefore follows that society is not in the least protected, for though a harmful member is cut off automatically and exiled to some remote spot just to get rid of him, another criminal takes his place at once, and often, two, perhaps. If anything does protect society even today and indeed reforms the criminal himself and brings about his regeneration, it is, again, only the law of Christ, which reveals itself in the awareness of one's own consciousness. Only by recognizing his own guilt as a son of a Christian society, that is, of the Church, does the criminal recognize his guilt towards society itself, that is, towards the Church. The criminal today, therefore, is capable of recognizing his guilt only towards the Church, and not towards the State. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Who cannot sympathize with the imprisoned Dmitri Karamazov as he tries to make sense of what he has just learned from a visiting academic?

"Imagine: inside, in the nerves, in the head - that is, these nerves are there in the brain ... (damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering ... that is, you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin quivering, those little tails ... and when they quiver, then an image appears ... it doesn't appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes ... and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment - devil take the moment! - but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it! That's why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all because I've got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All that is nonsense! Rakitin explained it all to me yesterday, brother, and it simply bowled me over. It's magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man's arising - that I understand.... And yet I am sorry to lose God!"

Dostoevsky's prescience is itself astonishing, because in 1880 only the rudiments of neural functioning were understood, and a reasonable person could have doubted that all experience arises from quivering nerve tails. But no longer. One can say that the information-processing activity of the brain causes the mind, or one can say that it is the mind, but in either case the evidence is ov ~ Steven Pinker

Education is one of the Grand Christianson Obsessions. They've been whole years my mother's kept us home for intensive private study. As a result of that, Paul will perform the first brain transplant, James will someday build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, Charlie – who is an actual musical genius – will probably end up writing the Great American Symphony, and I – I know a little bit about a lot of things.
I can tell you the chemical composition of the stuff your stick in your hair; how long it would take you, at just under the speed of light, to get to Alpha Centauri – and how old your body would be when you finally got there; the middle name of the third president of the United States; the amount of the present budget deficit; the author of the Brothers Karamazov, and how many feet there are in a line of trochaic heptameter. The Little Girl Who Had to Know Why, Paul used to call me. But even my mother couldn't reconcile me and math. ~ Kristen D. Randle

Hurrah for Karamazov! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That's my business, my dear boy, not yours. I am going on my own, because such is my will, while you were all dragged there by Alexei Karamazov, so there's a difference. And how do you know, maybe I'm not going to make peace at all? Silly expression!" "It wasn't Karamazov at all, not him at all. Some of us just started going there by ourselves, of course with Karamazov at first. And there was never anything like that, nothing silly. First one of us went, then another. His father was terribly glad to see us. You know, he'll just go out of his mind if Ilyusha dies. He can see Ilyusha's going to die. But he's so glad about us, that we made peace with Ilyusha. Ilyusha asked about you, but he didn't add anything more. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Oh, Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy. I sometimes imagine God only knows what, that everyone is laughing at me, the entire world, and at such moments, at such moments I am quiet simply ready to annihilate the entire order of things. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

475Oh, if you were the kind of man I am ... I loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty ... In a word
a Karamazov! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. ~ Haruki Murakami

Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov, there is a scene in which two people are talking about suffering. Ivan Karamazov is talking about there being any possibility that we can make sense of suffering, and here's what he says: "I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened."11 ~ Timothy Keller

A central principle underlying Mrs Quinty's Rules for Writing is that you have to have a Beginning Middle and End. If you don't have these your Reader is lost. But what if Lost is exactly where the writer is? I asked her. Ruth, the writer can't be lost, she said, and then knew she'd said it too quickly and bit her lip knowing I was going to say something about Dad. She pressed her knees together and diverted into a fit of dry coughing. This, Dear Reader, is a river narrative. My chosen style is The Meander. I know that in The Brothers Karamazov (Book 1,777, Penguin Classics, London) Ippolit Kirillovich chose the historical form of narration because Dostoevsky says it checked his own exuberant rhetoric. Beginnings middles and ends force you into that place where you have to Stick to the Story as Maeve Mulvey said the night the Junior Certs were supposed to be going to the cinema in Ennis but were buying cans in Dunnes and drinking ~ Niall Williams

Fyodor Pavlovich, for example, began with practically nothing, was a landowner of the very least important category, went trotting around other people's dinner tables, aspired to the rank of sponge, but at the moment of his decease turned out to possess something to the tune of one hundred thousand roubles in ready money. And yet at the same time he had persisted all his life in being one of the most muddle-headed madcaps in the whole of our district. I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever - but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A final word. Curious. Many years of reading many books has led me to a somewhat bizarre literary critical theory, namely that all significant texts are distinguished by the preponderance of a single word. In Alice's adventures in Wonderland that word is 'curious' (In The Brothers Karamazov it's 'ecstasy', but that needn't concern us here.) The word 'curious' appears so frequently in Carroll's text that it becomes a kind of tocsin awakening us from our reverie. But it isn't the strangeness of Alice's Wonderland that it reminds us of-it's the bizarre incomprehensibility of our own. ~ Will Self

The Brothers Karamazov, ~ Haruki Murakami

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. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
-Ivan Karamazov ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all. Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan's pride and murmuring against God.
The Brothers Karamazov
Book VI - The Russian Monk, Chapter 3 - Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zosima. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Brothers Karamazov ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Love life more than the meaning of it? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school. ~ Robert Hass

There is something spiteful and yet open-hearted about you ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If they drive God from earth, we shall shelter him underground - Dmitri Karamazov ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Long reflection on the condition of mankind as people
sentenced to death only leads to the justification of crime. Ivan simultaneously hates the death penalty
(describing an execution, he says furiously: "His head fell, in the name of divine grace") and condones
crime, in principle. Every indulgence is allowed the murderer, none is allowed the executioner. This
contradiction, which Sade swallowed with ease, chokes Ivan Karamazov. ~ Albert Camus

Never in my life did I lend the unfortunate Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov (for he is unfortunate now, in any case) the sum of three thousand roubles today, or any other money, never, never! I swear to it by all that is holy in our world. Khokhlakov ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
The Brothers Karamazov
Mitya (Dmitri) to Aloysha who visits him in prison, Book XI - Ivan, Chapter 4 - A Hymn and a Secret. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But in those eyes and in the lines of her exquisite lips there was something with which his brother might well be passionately in love, but which perhaps could not be loved for long. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In his heart there is the secret of renewal for all, the power that will finally establish the truth on earth, and all will be holy and will love one another, and there will be neither rich nor poor, neither exalted nor humiliated, but all will be the like the children of God, and the true kingdom of Christ will come.' That was the dream in Alyosha's heart." (Dostoyevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov: The Elders") ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Oh, Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am not a scoundrel, but I'm broadminded. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The truly great books are flawed: The Brothers Karamazov is unwieldy in structure; a present-day editor would probably want to cut the Grand Inquisitor scene because it isn't necessary to the plot. For me The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest novels ever written, and this is perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, its human faults. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

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. ~ Gordon T. Smith

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

ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity- the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough- but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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.' ~ Charlie Trotter

Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one's heart, out of old habit ...
Ivan Karamazov ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He longed to revenge himself on everyone for his own unseemliness ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don't live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are laughing- no, you are not laughing, you are angry again. You are forever angry, all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant's wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God's shrine ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

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. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I don't think-"
"Clearly. Why start now? ~ Leigh Bardugo

My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how 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. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, ... perhaps better than we actually are. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

I got on a Dostoyevsky kick right after college. I started with 'Crime and Punishment,' went on to 'The Possessed' and then 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot.' ~ Charlie Trotter

I'm five minutes late to Russian literature, where Mrs. Mahone and her wig assign us a ten-page paper on The Brothers Karamazov. ~ Jennifer Niven

Above all, don't lie to yourself." – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"I don't want to die without any scars." – Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

"Not all those who wander are lost." – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not." – André Gide, Autumn Leaves

"If you're making mistakes it means you're out there doing something." – Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art

"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." – Paulo Coelho, Brida

"If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives."
– Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator

"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do." – Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

"If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all." – John Green, Paper Towns

"Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer." – Dan Brown, Digital Fortress

"Fear is an illusion..." - Dark Templar, Starcraft 2 ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Note for a moment do I take you for a truth that is real,' Ivan exclaimed in what even amounted to fury. 'You are a falsehood, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only I do not know how to destroy you, and perceive that for a certain time I must suffer you. You are a hallucination I am having. You are the embodiment of myself, but only of one side of me ... of my thoughts and emotions, though only those that are most loathsome and stupid. In that regard you might even be of interest to me, if only I had time to throw away on you ... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Now, religion professes a special role in the protection and instruction of children. "Woe to him," says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, "who harms a child." The New Testament has Jesus informing us that one so guilty would be better off at the bottom of the sea, and with a millstone around his neck at that. But both in theory and in practice, religion uses the innocent and the defenseless for the purposes of experiment. By all means let an observant Jewish adult male have his raw-cut penis placed in the mouth of a rabbi. (That would be legal, at least in New York.) By all means let grown women who distrust their clitoris or their labia have them sawn away by some other wretched adult female. By all means let Abraham offer to commit filicide to prove his devotion to the Lord or his belief in the voices he was hearing in his head. By all means let devout parents deny themselves the succor of medicine when in acute pain and distress. By all means - for all I care - let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. By all means let a congregation that believes in whipping out the devil choose a new grown-up sinner each week and lash him until he or she bleeds. By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks. But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as sin. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Our historical pastime is the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov describing how a peasant lashes a horse on the eyes, 'on its meek eyes,' everyone must have seen it. It's peculiarly Russian. He describes how a feeble little nag has foundered under too heavy a load and cannot move. The peasant beats it, beats it savagely, beats it at last not knowing what he is doing in the intoxication of cruelty, thrashes it mercilessly over and over again. 'However weak you are, you must pull, if you die for it.' The nag strains, and then he begins lashing the poor defenceless creature on its weeping, on its 'meek eyes.' The frantic beast tugs and draws the load, trembling all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort of unnatural spasmodic action- it's awful in Nekrassov. But that only a horse, and God has horses to be beaten. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the hearth knows how to find what is precious ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what's irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky