It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognised by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The
Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them. The
That’s my business, my dear boy, not yours. I am going on my own, because such is my will, while you were all dragged there by Alexei Karamazov, so there’s a difference. And how do you know, maybe I’m not going to make peace at all? Silly expression! It wasn’t Karamazov at all, not him at all. Some of us just started going there by ourselves, of course with Karamazov at first. And there was never anything like that, nothing silly. First one of us went, then another. His father was terribly glad to see us. You know, he’ll just go out of his mind if Ilyusha dies. He can see Ilyusha’s going to die. But he’s so glad about us, that we made peace with Ilyusha. Ilyusha asked about you, but he didn’t add anything more.
He wasn't thinking about anything. There was just the odd random thought or scrap of thought, or the odd image without rhyme or reason: faces seen by him back in his childhood or people he'd seen only once and would never have recalled again; the bell tower of V______ Church; a billiard table in a tavern and some officer standing next to it; the smell of cigars in some basement tobacco shop; a drinking den; a back staircase, pitch dark, soaked in slops and spattered with eggshells; and from somewhere or other the ringing of Sunday bells . . .
The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, My Lord and my God! Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, I do not believe till I see.
Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and distracted stepmother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches. But at the same time he knew now and knew for certain that, although it filled her with dread and suffering, yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read to him that he might hear it, and to read now whatever might come of it! ... He read this in her eyes, he could see it in her intense emotion. She mastered herself, controlled the spasm in her throat and went on reading the еleventh chapter of St. John.
Snegiryov, fussing and bewildered, ran after the coffin in his old, short, almost summer coat, bare-headed, with his old wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand. He was in some sort of insoluble anxiety, now reaching out suddenly to support the head of the coffin, which only interfered with the bearers, then running alongside to see if he could find a place for himself. A flower fell on the snow, and he simply rushed to pick it up, as if God knows what might come from the loss of this flower.
Sırtüstü yatıp düşünmeyi, her şeyden çok seviyordum. Boyuna düşünüyordum. Sonra, rüyalar da görüyordum, tuhaf tuhaf rüyalar... Bunların ne biçim rüyalar olduğunu söylemek gereksiz, işte ancak o sıralarda, bir şeyler kurmaya başladım... Hayır, öyle değil... Yine öyle anlatamıyorum! Biliyor musun, o zaman ben boyuna kendi kendime şunu soruyordum: Ben niçin böyle budalayım? Demek ki, başkaları aptal, ben de onların aptal olduğunu kesin olarak biliyorum, niçin onlardan akıllı olmak istemiyorum? Sonra, şunu anladım ki, Sonya, herkesin akıllı olmasını beklemeye kalkarım, bu çok uzun sürecek... Sonra, şunu da anladım ki, böyle bir şey hiçbir zaman olmayacak, insanlar değişmeyecek... Onları değiştirecek kimse yoktur... Bunun için yorulmaya değmez! Ya, işte bu böyle!.. Bu bir kanundur... Kanun Sonya! Bu böyledir! Şimdi biliyorum ki, Sonya, akılca, ruhça, daha güçlü, daha sağlam olan herkes başkalarına buyurur! Daha yürekli, daha atak olan haklı çıkar... Umursamamakta en ileri gidenler kanun yapıcı olurlar. Herkesten daha atak olan, herkesten daha haklıdır! Bugüne kadar böyle gelmiş, bundan sonra da hep, böyle gidecektir! Bunu ancak körler göremez!
I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it has been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.