Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me--even then I would have jumped!

Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time.

They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

If there is no God, then I am God.