The Brothers Karamazov is a book published by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1880 that explores themes of spirituality, psychology, and the changing nature of Russia. It’s a mammoth 800-page piece of work that would never get written today, but nonetheless provides value to those who read it, especially if they are interested in understanding the Russian soul.
Here are my favorite quotes from the book…
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.
Without self-awareness, man is not able to see the errors of his behavior, and will always forge down the wrong path as if blindfolded. Even worse, he may attack anyone who attempts to remove his blindfold.
‘I love you madly,’ she says, ‘even if you do not love me– no matter, only be my husband. Don’t be afraid, I shan’t hinder you in any way, I’ll be your furniture, the rug you walk on … I want to love you eternally, I want to save you from yourself …’
I don’t believe it is possible to find a woman who would state the same thing today. Instead she’d explain, “I love you madly in this moment only, and I expect you to treat me like your queen. Be afraid, because if you hinder me, I will walk on you as if you’re my living room rug, and ensure that you do not escape my punishment.”
There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for man, as long as he remains free, than to find someone to bow down to as soon as possible. But man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it. For the care of these pitiful creatures is not just to find something before which I or some other man can bow down, but to find something that everyone else will also believe in and bow down to, for it must needs be all together. And this need for communality of worship is the chief torment of each man individually, and of mankind as a whole, from the beginning of the ages.
A man may make bold proclamations about being free, but as soon as he becomes free, he quickly seeks out an object or being to submit to, whether it’s a vice, a woman, or a god. It is impossible for a man to exist in nature without worshiping what he believes is higher than himself.
With bread you were given an indisputable banner: give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience– oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience. In this you were right. For the mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him.
As soon as a man sates his needs, he will then develop a new need which begs for satisfaction. The way to control men, it seems, is to keep them in an enduring state of need, so that they don’t escape the slavish cycle of worship.
Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble and wretched, will crawl to our feet and cry out to us: “Yes, you were right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to [the church]– save us from ourselves.”
Freedom from God and tradition did not lead to true freedom. Instead, it led to submission to egalitarian ideas, rationale that is manipulated by the ruling class, and the female form, which is lofted above us as the new gods that must be worshiped by all.
The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide! For the world says: “You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest and richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them”– this is the current teaching of the world. And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder, for they have been given rights, but have not yet been shown any way of satisfying their needs.
[…]
Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display. To have dinners, horses, carriages, rank, and slaves to serve them is now considered such a necessity that for the sake of it, to satisfy it, they will sacrifice life, honor, the love of mankind, and will even kill themselves if they are unable to satisfy it.
Materialism has failed, as Dostoevsky predicted. It produced such a spiritual void that the suicide switch of society has turned on by those on the left who want to destroy us all. While they actively engage in the promotion of sterility, authoritarianism, and death, the elite class is enjoying the decline to experience riches that were not fathomable in Dostoevsky’s time.
And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one’s habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? He is isolated, and what does he care about the whole? They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.
In a world where anything can be bought, what is valuable? If you can travel to anywhere, where is worth visiting? If you can take a picture every second of your life, which picture deserves another look? Pleasures that would have satisfied kings of past elicit a mere shrug from the normies of today, and even if they release themselves from the material and embark on a journey to “help others,” it comes not out of personal charity but to signal moral superiority, that I am better than you because I’m helping someone other than you. The drive to “help” becomes a personal weapon to attack others because it allows one to receive an egotistical pleasure that is higher than material pleasure.
If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point that you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all; go at once and seek torments for yourself, as if you yourself were guilty of their wickedness. Take these torments upon yourself and suffer them, and your heart will be eased, and you will understand that you, too, are guilty, for you might have shone to the wicked, even like [Jesus], but you did not. If you had shone, your light would have lighted the way for others, and the one who did wickedness would perhaps not have done so in your light.
It’s easier to declare someone an enemy than to hold a mirror to ourselves and identity the true source of our anger. Instead, our first instinct when someone conflicts with our views is to mock them and then share the mockery for all to see, which I’ve personally done on numerous occasions. When you’ve lost the connection with your fellow man, and when your neighbor acts as if he’s from another country, there is no motivation to seek mutual understanding.
Your work is for the whole, your deed is for the future. Never seek a reward, for great is your reward on earth without that: your spiritual joy, which only the righteous obtain.
I can’t help but think that this work would not succeed today because of its length. Attention spans are too short and patience is too limited for all but continual drama and action. Instead, it gives us a slice of family conflict and soul-searching as a country embarked on great change that mirrored much of what happened in the West. In Dostoevsky we can add another prescient author who clearly warned us about what would happen if we killed tradition and God.
Read More: “The Brothers Karamazov” on Amazon
Holy shit… that photo of the child tranny is a boy dressed up as a girl? Any outcry from the community wherever that child abuse took place?
Apparently not. No outcry. If anything, gay blogs are lauding it:
http://www.advocate.com/youth/2017/6/05/meet-8-year-old-drag-queen-lactatia
A couple of years ago I would say that this kid’s parents should be in jail. But at this point, we might as well throw 60% of society into jail and never let them out. There is no hope for them.
Society has fallen off a cliff and does not appear to ever be coming back.
“A couple of years ago I would say that this kid’s parents should be in jail. But at this point, we might as well throw 60% of society into jail and never let them out. There is no hope for them.”
Indeed…. apparently its all turning to shit at a higher rate now.
i could not agree more
apparently, in Canada, is child abuse to say anything. Bill has passed.
And any other Western Cuntry is ultimately the same…
The picture is nothing. You should hear it speak. It’s the best (worst?) Sassy Guy Dude you’ve ever heard. I only made 30 seconds, though.
Montreal
Canada… i shoulda known.
Dostoevsky is the greatest writer of all times.
yes, he is the genius writer who wrote especially for other geniuses to benefit.
Indeed, every man should read such classics like this novel by Dostoevsky as well as Victor Hugo and Dickens for good understanding of human nature.
“The ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger”
do what thou wilt, as “they” say…
…but i think they misunderstand.
will to power is the only real crusade.
imho, will “*under* love.
Read “The Possessed” or “Demons” (depending on the translation) for the definitive treatment and explication of the SJW.
The Possessed is the tale of a group of very unfortunate men, some of whom are truly gifted, exacerbating their collective downfall through their amateur revolutionary ideas and strange character flaws, among other social and psychological problems… The Brothers Karamazov on the other hand introduces pure genius, willpower and spirits that conquer even the darkest catacombs of the human soul, and is indubitably the greatest novel in history.
The Possessed is about communist utopians, and their true motivations.
I can”™t help but think that this work would not succeed today because of its length.
Forget the length. It could conceivably be made into a miniseries, like they did with Game of Thrones.
The problem is that the sensibility, the consciousness represented in D’s work isn’t in the world anymore. People are too narcissistic, self centered, and materialistic to care about any of the ideas in D’s work.
Novels like this could only interest a religious people, or at least a questioning people, who were not focused on the satisfaction of every carnal desire as the goal of existence.
People in the past wondered about eternity. People nowadays not only don’t believe in god, they believe in nothing that god ever represented. The hereafter is dead, and we will be dead when we face it. So for now we want our cummies and Samsung 8’s so we can get all the gusto possible before we die and rot.
I read somewhere that until the advent of radio, length in and of itself was considered a virtue in books, to the point that a book’s being extremely long was highlighted in advertising. It makes sense, since reading would have been one of the main ways to pass your time back then and books were probably expensive, so you would probably prefer something you couldn’t plow through in one or two sittings.
You can trace the devolution in thought and existence directly along the path from books->radio->television/movies->video-on-demand.
Now no one reads, and that’s the way the elites like it, because without reading, we lose the power of words, and without words we lose the ability to think.
The death of thought means we’re creatures of emotion now, easily manipulable by images and videos, and the people who control them.
In the past people used to express their opinions by saying “I think….” Now, almost everyone says “I feel….,” and that’s exactly what they mean.
Yes it is highly arguable that the human mind is deteriorating in modern times and additionally that this deterioration of the brain is highly conducive to mind control.
But maybe that is a conversation for another time.
It is our charge to resist this, regardless of whether the degradation is real or perceived.
“Forget the length. It could conceivably be made into a miniseries, like they did with Game of Thrones.
The problem is that the sensibility, the consciousness represented in D’s work isn’t in the world anymore. People are too narcissistic, self centered, and materialistic to care about any of the ideas in D’s work”
Good point. Anything can be abridged for the short attention span, but people don’t care about serious existentialist issues anymore.
Talk about a deer in headlights look if you raise any issue more advanced than food or the latest degeneracy on TV. You will get labeled a Sheldon if anything you say has the slightest intellectual bent or merit.
Does anyone remember a part of Brothers Karamazov where it says something like “it is a common belief of evil men that their lives will become better if they can just move to a different place”? I read the novel over 20 years ago and that part made a great impression on me, but I’ve never been able to find it again. If anyone can give me the exact quote, in English or in Russian, I would greatly appreciate it.
sounds like an ironic statement Ivan Karamazov would make, but probably belongs to the narrator’s own views. Every page of this book has pure genius emanating from it.
I’m almost certain it was the narrator. I read the novel almost 20 years ago and I’ve learned Russian since. I’d love to see the original, see how it matches up with what I remember.
I can say with a fair degree of confidence that not a single woman I’ve ever known has read Dostoevsky.
How odd, huh?
That’s because patriarchy keeps women away from great literature (Goethe, Kafka, Hesse, Dostojewskij).
Without the fucking white male suppressors women could be so powerful, but thankfully the muslims who are the real feminists are arriving to bring the opportunity of reading classical novels to the suffering white females….
Wow, the fact that what I just wrote is the basic consensus of our society makes me want to commit suicide
Women, and all students, have been liberated from having to concern themselves with the inherently oppressive, restrictive, and eurocentric value systems contained in the writings of dead white Christian males like Doestoevsky.
They have moved on, and opened themselves to the thought of contemporary progressive, diverse and open-minded writers like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love).
So let us raise the rainbow flag high, and exult in the unity in diversity of trans-matriarchy, as long as it remains confined there to the increasingly bizarre, degenerate, and gratuitously perverted North American land mass where it originated, and doesn’t infect the rest of the planet.
huh.
Perhaps homicide? Amongst other advantages, you can do it more than once!
A cathedral of mediocrity.
HATE CRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!!!!!!!!!!!!
How many men have either?
Men should probably focus on themselves before they focus on women.
says seven y.o. presty?
i wouldnt either if i had a snatch.
i THINK…..
I LUV PORN!
No books for you.
Dostoevsky states: “Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; ”
ISIS wouldn’t be ISIS if it weren’t instrumentalized and empowered by the web.
http://www.ilgiornale.it/sites/default/files/foto/2015/12/10/1449759953-isis-twitter-main.jpg
probably the best novel ever written, congratulations for bringing focus to this peerless masterpiece.
There is a saying that every man’s personality and worldview more-or-less matches up with one of the Karamazov brothers. I’m a Dimitri.
Irony: TL:DR read Dostoevsky cause TL:DR is for pussies. And the Society is dying on every spiritual level more than ever.
Just started reading it! Looking forward to uncovering all these gems in context.
In the past week, I saw a news clipping which had the LGBTQ crowd at a public school singing songs about the alternative families!! Almost barfed!