1. “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
2. “The world says: ‘You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.’ This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
3. “Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.”
4. “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
5. “Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man.”
6. “It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them, the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
7. “A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.”
8. “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
9.”To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
10. “I love mankind, but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love individual people.”
11. “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”
12. “Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything; and this is proved by the fact that each man thinks his own misery and his own ruin the hardest of all things to bear.”
13. “There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?”
14. “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
15. “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can purchase the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins.”
16. “Wealth can be wonderful, but you know, success can test one’s mettle as surely as the strongest adversary.”
17. “If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.”
18. “It is not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles.”
19. “The world will be saved by beauty.”
20. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”
21. “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
22. “Faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith.”
23. “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.”
24. “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”
25. “The soul is healed by being with children.”
26. “If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”
27. “In this world, even being good is a form of danger.”
28. “Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.”
29. “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
30. “The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”
31. “It is not by confining one’s neighbor that one is convinced of one’s own sanity.”
32. “To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
33. “Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything; and this is proved by the fact that each man thinks his own misery and his own ruin the hardest of all things to bear.”
34. “Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.”
35. “The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.”
36. “People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.”
37. “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
38. “Life is like a novel, and you are the author. If you don’t like the way it is going, write another chapter.”
39. “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
40. “It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them, the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
41. “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
42. “The world says: ‘You have needs—satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.’ This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
43. “The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.”
44. “The world is a veil, and the veil is woven of the woes of men.”