“O brothers, love is an instructress, but one must know how to acquire her, for she is acquired with effort, purchased dearly, by long labour and over a long season, for it is not simply for a casual moment that one must love, but for the whole of the appointed season.”
- The Elder Zosima, in “The Brothers Karamazov”
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky, from "The Brothers Karamazov"
“I think that everyone has a duty to love life above all else in the world.”
“To love life more than its meaning?”
“Most certainly; to love it before logic, for only then will I understand its meaning.”
From Book III of "The Brothers Karamazov"
"I don’t care! Let us render praise unto nature: look at all the sun, the heavens so cloudless, the leaves all green, it’s still high summer, four in the afternoon and what silence!”
- Dmitry to Alyosha, from "Book III: The Confessions of an Ardent Heart. In Verse”
The Elder's Speech to Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"
"...What is wrong? For the present you do not belong here. I give you my blessing for your great task of obedience in the world at large. You have much traveling yet to do. And you will have to get married, you will have to. You will have to endure everything before you return again. And there will be much work to do. But I have faith in you, and that is why I am sending you. With you is Christ. Cherish him and he will cherish you. You will behold great woe and in that woe you will be happy. Here is my behest to you: in woe seek happiness. Work, work untiringly.”
On Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"
“Before anything else I declare that this youth, Alyosha, was in no sense a fanatic, nor even in my opinion at any rate a mystic at all. I shall state in advance my complete opinion: he was simply an early lover of mankind, and if he had struck out along the monastery road it was only because it had at that time made a strong impression on him and presented itself to him, so to speak, as an ideal of deliverance for his soul, straining as it was out of the murk of worldly hatred unto the light of love.”