It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.

We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.

You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.

in the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night.