Quote collection
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"Prayer is addressed to the personal God, not because he is personal indeed, I know for certain that he is not personal, because personality is limitation, while God is unlimited."
"Art can compel people freely, gladly, and spontaneously to sacrifice themselves in the service of man."
"History, that is to say, the unconscious, universal life of humanity, in the aggregate, every moment profits by the life of kings for itself, as an instrument for the accomplishment of its own ends."
"When we do not love, we sleep, we are children of the dust - but love, and you are a god, you are pure, as on the first day of creation."
"Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you."
"I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy."
"The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort he read about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and identical way; and, third - most important - a perfect indifference to the business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and never made mistakes."
"Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position"."
"Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid."
"Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life... within a given age in a given society... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal... they are good; if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad."
"Love those you hate you."
"I am obliged to renounce violence, and abstain from it altogether."
"I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me"
"Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new."
"What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have come to be where you are," he said; "I can't help it."
"The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience."
"Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution of that will by others."
"The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness."
"This is where the strength of the physician lies, be he a quack, a homeopath or an allopath. He supplies the perennial demand for comfort, the craving for sympathy that every human sufferer feels."
"As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in argument justifying the other's activity, despised it in the depth of his heart."