The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else - something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.

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

Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.

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

It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.

And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.

It's curious and ridiculous how much the gaze of a prudish and painfully chaste man touched by love can sometimes express and that precisely at a moment when the man would of course sooner be glad to fall through the earth than to express anything with a word or a look.