A constant yearning for despair
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.
“Oh, you may be perfectly sure that if Columbus was happy, it was not after he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it! You may be quite sure that he reached the culminating point of his happiness three days before he saw the New World with his actual eyes, when his mutinous sailors wanted to tack about, and return to Europe! What did the New World matter after all? Columbus had hardly seen it when he died, and in reality he was entirely ignorant of what he had discovered. The important thing is life— life and nothing else! What is any ‘discovery’ whatever compared with the incessant, eternal discovery of life?
“But what is the use of talking? I’m afraid all this is so commonplace that my confession will be taken for a schoolboy exercise—the work of some ambitious lad writing in the hope of his work ‘seeing the light’; or perhaps my readers will say that
‘I had perhaps something to say, but did not know how to express it.’
“Let me add to this that in every idea emanating from genius, or even in every serious human idea—born in the human brain—there always remains something—some sediment—which cannot be expressed to others, though one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thirty years. There is always a something, a remnant, which will never come out from your brain, but will remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever, and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what may be the very essence of your idea to a single living soul.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 1869
(via oldworldwisdom)
Well, if God doesn’t exist, who’s laughing at us?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov (Submitted by
saber-y-conocer)
Oh, gentlemen, you know perhaps I only consider myself to be an intelligent person because all my life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything. Very well, very well, I’m a chatterbox, a harmless, annoying chatterbox, like we all are. But what can be done about it if the direct and single purpose of any intelligent person is to chatter, that is to say the deliberate puring of emptiness into the void?
..all is in a man’s hands and he let’s it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. 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.
They wanted to say something, but could not. Tears came. They were both pale and thin; yet in those pale, sickly faces there already glowed the light of the renewed future, resurrection to a new life. Love resurrected them; the heart of one contained infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.
Of course, there are passions, mistakes, but one must also make allowances; passions testify to enthusiasm for the cause, and to the wrong external situation in which the cause finds itself.
—
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (New translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) (via
slaphisface)
(Source: willbillyum)
…Think! When there is torture there is pain and wounds, physical agony, and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering, so that one is tormented only by the wounds until the moment of death. But the most terrible agony many not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant – your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that is certain; the worst thing is that it is certain.
— The Idiot, Dostoevsky.
Who could say that human nature can endure such a trial without slipping into madness? Why this ghastly, needless outrage? Perhaps there is a man to whom the death sentence was read and who was allowed to suffer and then told, ‘Go, You are pardoned.’ Perhaps such a man could tell us something. This was the agony and the horror of which Christ told too. No, you cannot treat a man like that.
— The Idiot, Dostoevsky.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s study.
‘Well, and what if I’m mistaken?’ he suddenly found himself exclaiming. ‘What if man - the whole human race in general, I mean - isn’t really a villain at all? If that’s true, it means that all the rest is just a load of superstition, just a lot of fears that have been put into people’s heads, and there are no limits, and that’s how it’s meant to be!…’
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Crime and Punishment (
Submitted by northernpoint)
All is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. 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.
burningmonochrome:
“If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral; everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”
(Source: enfuite)
