For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.

I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays & the soft tender gentle memories that come with them...’ -Father Zossima

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.

Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!

But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.

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!

He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.