Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
Interpretation
Humans can exhibit a level of cruelty that surpasses that of animals, often with artistic flair.
This quote by Dostoevsky reflects the belief that humanity possesses a unique capacity for cruelty that is both sophisticated and deeply disturbing. Unlike animals, whose brutality is instinctual and straightforward, humans have the ability to inflict pain in elaborate and artistic ways, which highlights the dark aspects of human nature and morality.
In practice
During a lecture on human nature, this quote can emphasize the darker aspects of ethics and morality.
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.
Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it's for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!
...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
The light that Yoga sheds on life is something special. It is transformative. It does not just change the way we see things; it transforms the person who sees.
History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
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