Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility.
There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family,pleasing presence, average education, to be "not stupid," kindhearted,and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single ideaof one's own—to be, in fact, "just like everyone else."Of such people there are countless numbers in this world—far moreeven than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all mencan—that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer.The former of these classes is the happier.To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing issimpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in thatbelief without the slightest misgiving.Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, puton blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they havebeen able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that theyhave acquired new convictions of their own. Some men have but feltsome little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact hasbeen quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van ofenlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they.Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediatelyassimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain.The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developedto a wonderful extent in such cases;—unlikely as it appears, it is metwith at every turn.... those belonged to the other class—to the "much cleverer"persons, though from head to foot permeated and saturated withthe longing to be original. This class, as I have said above, is far lesshappy. For the "clever commonplace" person, though he may possiblyimagine himself a man of genius and originality, none the less has withinhis heart the deathless worm of suspicion and doubt; and this doubtsometimes brings a clever man to despair. (As a rule, however, nothingtragic happens;—his liver becomes a little damaged in the course of time,nothing more serious. Such men do not give up their aspirations afteroriginality without a severe struggle,—and there have been men who,though good fellows in themselves, and even benefactors to humanity,have sunk to the level of base criminals for the sake of originality)
To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible.
There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men's sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.
Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.
He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet - and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him - and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity - it would be better to live so than die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how - only to live! ...How true! Lord, how true! Man is a scoundrel! And he's a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel for that.