Demons Dostoevsky Quotes

God is the pain of the fear of death

Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.

You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.

So, according to you, the other God does exist after all?' 'He doesn't exist, but He is. There's no pain in a stone, but there's pain in the fear of a stone.

...and in fact I've noticed that faith always seems to be less in the daytime

You’re very clever and learned, but you know nothing at all about life.

Life is now given to man at the cost of pain and fear. Here, they are blinded by this sometimes. Now man is not yet that man. There will be another, new person, happy and proud, and for him it wouldn’t matter the death-life. He who overcomes pain and fear will become God himself. There will not be that God any longer.

We are all to blame, we are all to blame … and if only all were convinced of it!

There are crimes that are truly uncomely. With crimes, whatever they may be, the more blood, the more horror there is, the more imposing they are, the more picturesque, so to speak, but there are crimes that are shameful, disgraceful, all horror aside, so to speak, even far too ungracious...

I don’t understand how, up to now, an atheist could know there is no God and not kill himself at once. To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize at the same time that you have become God, is an absurdity, otherwise you must necessarily kill yourself. Once you recognize it, you are king, and you will not kill yourself but will live in the chiefest glory. But one, the one who is first, must necessarily kill himself, otherwise who will begin and prove it? It is I who will necessarily kill myself in order to begin and prove it. I am still God against my will, and I am unhappy, because it is my duty to proclaim self-will. Everyone is unhappy, because everyone is afraid to proclaim self-will. That is why man has been so unhappy and poor up to now, because he was afraid to proclaim the chief point of self-will and was self-willed only on the margins, like a schoolboy. I am terribly unhappy, because I am terribly afraid. Fear is man’s curse … But I will proclaim self-will, it is my duty to believe that I do not believe. I will begin, and end, and open the door. And save. Only this one thing will save all men and in the next generation transform them physically; for in the present physical aspect, so far as I have thought, it is in no way possible for man to be without the former God. For three years I have been searching for the attribute of my divinity, and I have found it: the attribute of my divinity is—Self-will! That is all, by which I can show in the main point my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom. For it is very fearsome. I kill myself to show my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom.” Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2010-05-06). Demons (Vintage Classics) (p. 619). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

And those who have no people, have no God! You may be sure that all those who cease to understand their people and lose their connection with them, at once, in the same measure, also lose the faith of their fathers, and become either atheists or indifferent.

local Jews, who, over the past two years, as if on purpose, had been settling in terrible quantities in our town,

Dostoevsky’s Demons.

There are strange friendships,” Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. “Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die.” A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.

The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has been forbidden, by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses. 　　All that one has felt, but has not dared to think; all that one has thought, but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us. There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, will not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace? What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We require embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even down there, where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will serve their purpose! This applies as much to the Realists, with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters of Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!

There’s nothing more devious than one’s own self, because no one will believe it. And, I admit I had wanted to play the fool, because a fool is easier than one’s own self; but since a fool is an extreme, after all, and an extreme sparks curiosity, then I finally settled on my very own self.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you’re trying a screenplay, you know it’s never going to be Bergman. If it’s a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters that led you to the prison of your desk. But if you’re a writer, that’s what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence. You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I’m going to do it this one time. I’m going to tell you things you never knew. I’ve—got—secrets!

Everything is competing to show its good will. Things tend irresistibly towards perfection, effusiveness, reconciliation. Fortunately, nothing is ever perfect, thanks to Dostoevsky's 'unspeakable little demon ... that evil spirit that prompts to murder and scorn.' Everything tends irresistibly towards transparency. However, there remains a glimmer of secrecy - a clandestine dust-breeding that is mostly useless, an umbilical mirage, insider trading, but secret all the same.

Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That’s how they’ve made it. Life now is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that is the whole deceit. Man now is not yet the right man. There will be a new man, happy and proud. He for whom it will make no difference whether he lives or does not live, he will be the new man. He who overcomes pain and fear will himself be God. And this God will not be.

My friend, I've told lies all my life. Even when I was speaking the truth. I never said anything for the sake of truth, but only for myself. I knew that before, but only now do I see it... Oh, where are those friends whom I have offended with my friendship my whole life? And it's all of them, all of them! Savez-vous, perhaps I'm lying even now; I'm probably lying even now. The main thing is that I believe myself when I lie. The hardest thing in life is to live and not lie... and... and not to believe your own lies, yes, yes, that's it precisely! But wait a moment, more of that later... We're together, together!' he added with enthusiasm.

Demons have faith, but they tremble.

Some sort of Lyamshins, Telyatnikovs, landowner Tentetnikovs, homegrown milksop Radishchevs,2 little Jews with mournful but haughty smiles,

There has never yet been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of evil and good.

Man has done nothing but invent God, so as to live without killing himself; in that lies the whole of world history up to now.

Everyone is unhappy, because everyone is afraid to proclaim self-will.

The waves of liberation movements from the 1960s have disenchanted us vis à vis ‘old-fashioned’ restrictive values but have also forced upon us new codes of thought and behaviour, summarised in the clumsy phrase ‘political correctness’ and the morality of uncritical respect for difference and diversity. (I lazily say ‘us’ and, of course, this is not true for everyone.) We have learned from psychoanalysis that whatever is repressed will emerge projectively later or elsewhere, often in even more virulent forms. Hence, in recent years we have seen waves of paedophile scandals, celebrated cannibal cases, serial murders, school shootings and mass murders committed by terrorists. The naivety of the nice peaceful Left runs parallel to the converse unbridled greed of bankers, internet criminals, drug dealers and pornographers. These trends might scotch any illusions of linear and easy progress but they do not. If Dostoevsky’s over-quoted ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’ is true, nihilism steps into the vacuum, and subsequently moralistic alarm steps in to call for a return to traditional values. But Pandora’s box will not close, every demon is now loose.

Nothing in the world ever ends.

There are seconds, they only come five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it’s heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must physically change or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: ‘Yes this is true, this is good.’ This. . . this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything, because there’s no longer anything to forgive. You don’t really love—oh, what is here is higher than love! What’s most frightening is that it’s so terribly clear and there’s such joy. If it were longer than five seconds—the soul couldn’t endure it and would vanish. In those five seconds I live my life through, and for them I would give my whole life, because it’s worth it.

And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it. An live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here! Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty—are you aware of that, you who are laughing?—it would turn into boorishness, you couldn’t invent the nail! . . . I will not yield!

Back when I was serving with the hussars, I kept reflecting about God. It’s an accepted fact that in all poems that a hussar drinks and carouses; so, sir, maybe I did drink, but, would you believe, I used to jump out of bed in the middle of the night, just in my socks, and start crossing myself in front of the icon, asking God to send me faith, because even then I couldn’t be at peace: is there God or not?

There are things... of which it is not only impossible to speak intelligently, but of which it is not intelligent even to begin speaking.

I can't understand how an atheist could could know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot.

I can't understand how an atheist could know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot.

My words don't constitute permission or a prescription, and therefore there's no insult to your self-esteem. If you had wanted to take my place at the altar, you could have done so without any permission from me, and then there would of course have been no reason for me to come to you with this madness.

Generally speaking, in every misfortune that befalls one's neighbour there is something that gladdens the eye of the onlooker, it doesn't make any difference who you may be.

And add the observation... that we always find something pleasing in someone else's misfortune.

The horror [in society] will be widespread, and of course more false than sincere. People are fearful only of whatever threatens their personal interests.

Even the form of a great act of repentance like this one does have something ridiculous about it. Oh, don't believe that you won't prevail!' he exclaimed almost in ecstasy. 'Even this form will prevail' (he pointed at the pages) 'if only you will sincerely accept being slapped and spat upon. The end result has always been that the most shameful cross becomes a great glory and a great power, if the great deed has been sincerely humble. Perhaps you will find consolation even in your lifetime!' 'And so, what you find ridiculous is just in the form, in the style?' 'And in the substance. The ugliness will kill it,' Tikhon whispered, lowering his eyes. 'What's that? Ugliness? Where's the ugliness?' 'Of the crime. There are crimes that are truly ugly. In crimes, of whatever kind, the more blood and horror there is, the more appealing they are, or, so to speak, picturesque. But there are shameful crimes, disgraceful ones that transcend any horror, so to speak, even too inelegant, actually...' Tikhon, did not finish speaking. 'In other words,' an agitated Stavrogin picked up his thought, 'you find that I cut a highly ridiculous figure when I kissed the foot of the dirty little girl... and everything I said about my temperament, and... well, and everything else... I understand. I understand you very well. And you despair of me precisely because it's not pretty, its disgusting - no, not so much disgusting as shameful and ridiculous, and you think that's what I wont be able to bear most of all?

Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to…’ ‘To the gorilla?

There will be entire freedom when it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live. That is the goal to everything.” “The goal? But then perhaps no one will even want to live?” “No one,” he said resolutely.

They got everything out of books, and even at the first rumor from our progressive corners in the capital were prepared to throw anything whatsoever out the window, provided they were advised to throw it out.

There was perhaps more anger in Nikolai Vsevolodovich than in those two together, but this anger was cold, calm, and, if one may put it so, reasonable, and therefore the most repulsive and terrible that can be.

If you found out that you believe in God, you would believe; but since you don’t know yet that you believe in God, you don’t believe

On the one hand, then, the demons of the title belong to the folkloric realm of spirits; they are devilish misleaders of men, tricksters, whose presence is deduced from the question: “We’ve lost our way, what shall we do?

It is the eschatological light of all the Gospel accounts of Christ’s miracles and healings, which are not supernatural or magical but prefigure the coming of the Kingdom of God. Luke’s account of the Gerasene demoniac is considerably longer than the passage Dostoevsky cites. His selection emphasizes two things: the self-destruction of the swine, and the healing of the man. This, highly abbreviated, is the plot of Demons.

He is a man blinded by his own lucidity, in René Girard’s terms. It is a lucidity produced by elimination; there is an absence at the center of his thought, a golfo mistico through which the demons enter, turning his idea into its opposite. And it is not just any idea, but the one dearest to us all—the idea of freedom.

In each case, with each voice of this many-voiced composition, we have sought “natural” English equivalents for the richly unnatural languages of the original.

the ultimate artistic criterion for Dostoevsky: not fidelity to his own convictions and not fidelity to convictions themselves taken abstractly, but precisely a fidelity to the authoritative image of a human being.

Everything is inverted here: freedom ends in despotism, adoration turns to hatred, lucidity increases blindness, the first real act of the liberator of mankind—Nechaev or Verkhovensky—is the murder of his human brother. Seeking the greatest good, we do the greatest evil. The demons parody God’s world and invert its ends, playing for its loss. And the source of all these inversions, the primordial parody, is the replacement of the “authoritative image of a human being” by the would-be autonomous human will.

why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are at the same time such incredible misers, acquirers, property-lovers, so much so that the more socialist a man is, the further he goes, the more he loves property … why is it?

Don’t they understand that in order to acquire an opinion what is needed first of all is labor, one’s own labor, one’s own initiative and experience! Nothing can ever be acquired gratis. If we labor, we shall have our own opinion. And since we shall never labor, those who have been working for us all along will have the opinion instead—that is, Europe again, the Germans again, our teachers from two hundred years back. Besides, Russia is too great a misunderstanding for us to resolve ourselves, without the Germans and without labor. For twenty years now I’ve been ringing the alarm and calling to labor! I’ve given my life to this call, and—madman—I believed! Now I no longer believe, but I still ring and shall go on ringing to the end, to my grave; I shall pull on the rope until the bells ring for my funeral!

And yet the trashiest people suddenly gained predominance and began loudly criticizing all that’s holy, whereas earlier they had not dared to open their mouths, and the foremost people, who until then had so happily kept the upper hand, suddenly began listening to them, and became silent themselves; and some even chuckled along in a most disgraceful way.

Our most solid minds are now marveling at themselves: how could they suddenly have gone so amiss then?

Now it is being suggested to us, through various strewn-about leaflets of foreign manufacture, that we close ranks and start groups with the sole purpose of universal destruction, under the pretext that however you try to cure the world, you’re not going to cure it, but by radically lopping off a hundred million heads,

It is my duty to proclaim unbelief,” Kirillov was pacing the room. “For me no idea is higher than that there is no God. The history of mankind is on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God, so as to live without killing himself; in that lies the whole of world history up to now. I alone for the first time in world history did not want to invent God. Let them know once and for all.

And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without BREAD, and it only cannot live without beauty. . . . Demons Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872)

В преходните времена тая сган, която я има във всяко общество, се надига, и при това не само че няма никакви цели, но няма дори капка разум и с всички сили изразява единствено тревога и нетърпение. Същевременно тая сган, без да подозира, почти винаги попада под командата на тайфата действащи с определена цел „напредничави“, която пък насочва всичките тия отрепки на обществото натам, накъдето й е угодно, освен ако самата тя не се състои от пълни идиоти, което впрочем също се случва.

MSB: La Rochefoucauld says that Cardinal de Retz (whom he didn't like) looked upon Pascal as a great rival. RG: The cardinal didn't have Pascal's genius, but he did have the human experience that Pascal lacked as both a very sick and a very lonely man. Montaigne, on the other hand, was too happy, too untroubled. Montaigne really prefigures the French bourgeois who has tasted success—the rat in his cheese, as one might say. MSB: You consider Montaigne's carefree spirit as a form of social blindness. Do you see a comparable danger in the determination to experience love as the only thing, the last thing possible in life? One finds this determination embodied, for example, by Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. RG: Prince Myshkin is an ambiguous, ambivalent character, and to consider him as truly good, as many people do, is an error. Looking at Dostoevsky's notebooks for The Idiot, we see that Prince Myshkin, just like Stavrogin in The Demons, is the hypostasis of a person who has no desire. The absence of desire is Stavrogin's weakness, his suicidal side. He makes all sorts of attempts to arouse in others the desire, the mimetic desire, that he doesn't have. This is very clear in the duels: he always wins, because he never loses his nerve. Myshkin's attitude is much the same, I believe. Dostoevsky himself, confronted with a personality that was stronger than his own, wondered if it was the result of an excess of desire, or of a total absence of it. His notebooks make it clear that Stavrogin and Myshkin are monstrous figures who lack the same thing. Like Stavrogin, Myshkin has a negative effect on people around him—General Ivolgin, for example. Women fall in love with him because he has no mimetic desire. They are therefore his victims, although Myshkin himself seems not to understand what is going on. Isn't this precisely because he is unacquainted with mimetic desire? It seems to be a kind of physical defect, almost a biological deficiency. Otherwise, Myshkin must be regarded as a kind of Buddhist. One character in The Idiot wonders whether Myshkin isn't carrying out a deliberate strategy. His attitude may well be entirely calculating, who knows? Dostoevsky himself, it seems to me, hadn't answered these questions in his own mind. MSB

the demons came out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine, i.e. into the Nechaevs … etc.

The “healing” of the sick man is, however, barely adumbrated in the novel; the intensity of the demonic paroxysm all but overshadows it; yet awakening does come in extremis to Stepan Trofimovich, whose end is the antithesis of Stavrogin’s, but equally exemplary

It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you,” Pyotr Verkhovensky says to Kirillov

The image of the ideal human being or the image of Christ represents for him the resolution of ideological quests. This image or this highest voice must crown the world of voices, must organize and subdue it.

The “seed of the idea of destruction” is the revolt against God; but that is over and done with, it is already forgotten, no one is concerned with it anymore. What follows is man’s replacement of God and the correction of His creation. This amounts to a declaration of the absurdity and meaninglessness of history, of historical reality as the unfolding of God’s will in time, but also as the lived life of mankind—that is, to a separation from the historical body of mankind. Reality itself, physical reality, begins to drain out of this radical “idea,” leaving only the drab abstraction of materialism.

Here, in what many consider the darkest of his novels, Dostoevsky inscribes the fundamental freedom of Judeo-Christian revelation—the freedom to turn from evil, the freedom to repent. His vision is not Manichaean; he does not see evil as co-eternal with good. Evil cannot be the essence of any living person. The “possessed” can at any moment be rid of their demons, which are wicked but also false.

The assertion of human autonomy is finally a revolt against God; it is also the final lie, the mystification behind all the demystifying critiques of modern times. It was in this light that Dostoevsky saw not only the political movements of his day, but the ideas that nourished them—ideas that came a bit late to Russia, but developed there at an accelerated pace.

The demons, then, are ideas, that legion of isms that came to Russia from the West: idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism. To which the Slavophils opposed their notions of the Russian earth, the Russian God, the Russian Christ, the “light from the East,” and so on.

Ideas that deface or distort this “authoritative image of a human being” in a person are indeed acting like demons, and are them.

A great many ideas are coming to me now: you see, it’s just like our Russia. These demons who come out of the sick man and enter the swine — these are all the sores, all the contagions, all the uncleanness, all the demons, large and small, who have accumulated in our great and beloved sick man, our Russia, over the course of centuries, centuries! Oui, cette Russie, que j’aimais toujours. But she will be protected by a great idea and a great will from on high, just like that madman possessed by demons, and all these demons, all the uncleanness, all this filth that has festered on the surface… all this will beg to enter the swine. And perhaps they have already entered them! That’s us, us and them, and my son Petrusha… et les autres avec lui, and I perhaps am the first, standing at the very head; and we shall throw ourselves, the madmen and the possessed, from a rock into the sea and we shall all drown, and that’s no more than we deserve, because that’s precisely what we’re fit for.

You shouldn’t have offended him.” “And what should I have done?” “You should have killed him.” “You’re sorry I didn’t kill him?” “I’m not sorry about anything. I thought you really wanted to kill him. You don’t know what you’re seeking.” “I’m seeking a burden,” laughed Stavrogin.

You at least are not angry with me?” Stavrogin gave him his hand. “Not at all!” Kirillov turned back to shake hands with him. “If the burden is light for me because of my nature, then maybe the burden is heavier for you because of your nature. Nothing to be much ashamed of, only a little.

it’s very easy for Pyotr Stepanovich to live in the world, because he imagines a man and then lives with him the way he imagined him.

He’s got each member of society watching the others and obliged to inform. Each belongs to all, and all to each. They’re all slaves and equal in their slavery. Slander and murder in extreme cases, but above all—equality. First, the level of education, science, and talents is lowered. A high level of science and talents is accessible only to higher abilities—no need for higher abilities! Higher abilities have always seized power and become despots. Higher abilities cannot fail to be despots and have always corrupted rather than been of use; they are to be banished or executed. Cicero’s tongue is cut off, Copernicus’s eyes are put out, Shakespeare is stoned—this is Shigalyovism! Slaves must be equal: there has never yet been either freedom or equality without despotism, but within a herd there must be equality, and this is Shigalyovism!

Only one thing is lacking in the world: obedience. The thirst for education is already an aristocratic thirst. As soon as there’s just a tiny bit of family or love, there’s a desire for property. We’ll extinguish desire: we’ll get drinking, gossip, denunciation going; we’ll get unheard-of depravity going; we’ll stifle every genius in infancy. Everything reduced to a common denominator, complete equality.

But one or two generations of depravity are necessary now, an unheard-of, mean little depravity, that turns men into vile, cowardly, cruel, self-loving slime—that’s what’s needed!

You understand now that the whole salvation for everyone is to prove this thought to them all. Who will prove it? I! I don’t understand how, up to now, an atheist could know there is no God and not kill himself at once. To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize at the same time that you have become God, is an absurdity, otherwise you must necessarily kill yourself. Once you recognize it, you are king, and you will not kill yourself but will live in the chiefest glory. But one, the one who is first, must necessarily kill himself, otherwise who will begin and prove it?

The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they will not live and will die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite is as necessary for man as the small planet he inhabits … My friends, all, all of you: long live the Great Thought! The eternal, immeasurable Thought! For every man, whoever he is, it is necessary to bow before that which is the Great Thought. Even the stupidest man needs at least something great.

Real genuine sorrow will sometimes make even a phenomenally frivolous, unstable man solid and stoical; for a short time at any rate; what's more, even fools are by genuine sorrow turned into wise men, also only for a short time of course; it is characteristic of sorrow.

Stavrogin, why am I condemned to believe in you for all eternity? Could I really have spoken as I did with anyone else? I am a chaste man, but I was not afraid of my nakedness, because I was speaking with Stavrogin. I was not afraid to caricature a great idea with my touch, because Stavrogin was listening to me. Do you think I won’t kiss your footprints when you’ve left?

Stavrogin, why am I condemned to believe in you for all eternity? Could I really have spoken as I did with anyone else? I am a chaste man, but I was not afraid of my nakedness, because I was speaking with Stavrogin. I was not afraid to caricature a great idea with my touch, because Stavrogin was listening to me. Do you think I won’t kiss your footprints when you’ve left? I can’t tear you out of my heart, Nikolay Stavrogin!

There were two, and suddenly there’s a third human being, a new spirit, whole, finished, such as doesn’t come from human hands; a new thought and a new love, it’s even frightening … And there’s nothing higher in the world!

If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will.

It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is—for me to kill myself.

To kill someone else would be the lowest point of my self-will, and there’s the whole of you in that. I am not you: I want the highest point, and will kill myself.

Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is—madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil’s vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you’re a man.

and I am unhappy, because it is my duty to proclaim self-will. Everyone is unhappy, because everyone is afraid to proclaim self-will. That is why man has been so unhappy and poor up to now, because he was afraid to proclaim the chief point of self-will and was self-willed only on the margins, like a schoolboy. I am terribly unhappy, because I am terribly afraid. Fear is man’s curse … But I will proclaim self-will, it is my duty to believe that I do not believe. I will begin, and end, and open the door. And save. Only this one thing will save all men and in the next generation transform them physically; for in the present physical aspect, so far as I have thought, it is in no way possible for man to be without the former God. For three years I have been searching for the attribute of my divinity, and I have found it: the attribute of my divinity is—Self-will!

I also know that it was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you, and so you won’t put it off.

I kill myself to show my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom.

for the systematic shaking of the foundations, for the systematic corrupting of society and all principles; in order to dishearten everyone and make a hash of everything, and society being thus loosened, ailing and limp, cynical and unbelieving, but with an infinite yearning for some guiding idea and for self-preservation—to take it suddenly into their hands, raising the banner of rebellion,

My desires are far too weak; they cannot guide.

Why libel French cleverness? It's simply Russian indolence, our degrading impotence to produce ideas, our revolting parasitism in the rank of nations.

Yes, I couldn’t immediately tear myself away from everything to which I had become attached since childhood — it would have been too bloody — and on which I had lavished all the ecstasies of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred… It’s hard to change gods.

This tiny little word “why” has been spread throughout the entire universe from the very first day of creation, madam, and all of nature at every moment cries out to its creator: “Why?” And for seven thousand years now it has received no answer.

If you want to conquer the entire world, conquer yourself.

I’ve rarely met a more limp woman, and besides, her legs are swollen, and besides, she is kind.

he’s flighty, he dithers, he’s cruel, he’s an egotist, he has base habits, but you should appreciate him, first of all, if only because there are those who are far worse.

kept repeating until daybreak to him: ‘You are still useful; you will still make your mark; you will be valued… in some other place.

If you want to overcome the whole world , overcome yourself.

I would perhaps compare him with some gentleman of the past, of whom our society keeps alive certain legendary memories. People used to say, for example, of the Decembrist Lunin, that he purposely sought out danger all his life, would revel in the sensation of it, would it a make a necessary part of his nature. In his youth he would fight a duel for no reason. In Siberia he would go after a bear with just a knife, and in the Siberian forests he loved to come across escaped convicts, who, I will note in passing, were more terrifying than any bear. There is no doubt that these legendary gentlemen were capable of experiencing, and even perhaps to a high degree, a sense of fear; otherwise, they would have been much more calm, and the sense of danger would not have become a necessary part of their nature. But to overcome cowardice in themselves - that, of course, is what proved so seductive. The constant revelling in victory and the awareness that there was no one who could get the better of you - that's what attracted them.

But by now he was babbling mechanically. He was utterly crushed by the news and was completely disoriented. And yet, almost immediately, the minute he walked out on to the front steps and opened the umbrella over his head, the ever-consoling thought once again began to hatch in his frivolous and roguish head that people were deceiving him and lying to him, and if so, then he had nothing to fear, but was the one to be feared.

Pyotr Stepanovich was perhaps not a stupid man, but Fedka the Convict got it just right when he said of him that 'he himself goes and invents a man and then lives with him'. He left von Lembke fully convinced that he'd calmed him down for at least six days, and this was the length of time that was absolutely necessary to him. But his idea was false, and was entirely and solely based on his having invented from the very outset an Andrey Antonovich, once and for all, who was a complete and utter simpleton. As with every morbidly suspicious man, Andrey Antonovich was extremely and happily trustful the moment he emerged from the realm of the unknown. This new turn of events at first presented itself to him in a rather pleasant light, despite certain troublesome complications that were again beginning to appear. At least his old doubts were crumbling into dust. Besides, he had grown so tired over the past few days, he felt himself so exhausted and helpless that his soul could not help but yearn for peace. But alas! He already felt uneasy again.