March 2012
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We even find it hard to be men, men of REAL flesh and blood, our own flesh and blood. We are ashamed of it. We think it a disgrace. And we do our best to be some theoretical “average” men.
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“Which is better: cheap happiness or exalted suffering? Well, which is better?”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“Isn’t everything here happiness when the three of them - husband, wife,...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“The important thing is to love and to have courage.”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“It is a remarkable fact that these attacks of the “sublime and the...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“I had moments of such positive intoxication, of such intense happiness, that, I...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
The characteristics of the Russian romantic are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it incomparably more clearly that the most positive of our thinkers; to refuse to take anyone or anything for granted, but at the same time not to despise anything; to go round and round everything and to yield to everything out of policy; never to lose sight of the useful and the practical...
“But where can man go?”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“Man likes to create and to clear paths - that is undeniable. But why is he also...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the point of exasperation, I...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“At all events I know that I shall never be content with a compromise, with an...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“Whether it is good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant to smash things.”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
February 2012
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“Perhaps the greatest peril we have to avoid is not being fervent from zeal, but...”
– Robespierre
“Weakness, vice, prejudice are the road to royalty.”
– Robespierre
Thus all that tends to stir the love of country, to purify morals and customs, to elevate souls, to direct the passions of the human heart toward the public interest, ought to be adopted or established by you. All that tends to concentrate them in the abjection of the personal self, to reawaken the infatuation for petty things and disdain for great things, ought to be rejected or suppressed.
...
We want to substitute, in our land, morality for egotism; probity for honor; principles for customs; ethics for propriety; the rule of reason for the tyranny of fashion; disdain for vice for disdain for misfortune; self-respect for insolence; spiritual grandeur for vanity; love of glory for love of money; good men for good society; merit for intrigue; genius for wit; truth for brilliance; the...
What is the end toward which we are aiming? The peaceable enjoyment of liberty and equity; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws have been graven not on marble and stone but in the hearts of all men, even the slave who forgets them and the tyrant who denies them.
Robespierre
Farsighted precautions are needed to make liberty’s destiny depend on the truth, which is eternal, more than on men, who are ephemeral, so that if the government forgets the people’s interests or if it falls back into the hands of corrupt men, in accordance with the natural course of things, the light of recognized principles will make clear its betrayals, and so that every new faction...
“For, except for a few nuances of perfidy or cruelty, all tyrants are alike.”
– Robespierre
“Let us assume it is a law of logic, but how do you know that it is also a human...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
For it seems to me that the whole meaning of human life can be summed up in the one statement that man only exists for the purpose of proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not an organ stop! Even if it means physical suffering, even if it means turning his back on civilization, he will prove it.
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this...”
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Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of...”
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Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
“Who would want to desire according to a mathematical formula?”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
And one may choose to do something even if it is against one’s own advantage, and sometimes one positively should (that is my idea). One’s own free and unfettered choice, one’s own whims, however wild, one’s own fancy, overwrought though it sometimes may be to the point of madness - that is that same most desirable good which we overlooked and which does not fit into any...
