In Job's Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths
Lev Shestov
Top 10 Best Quotes
“If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.”
“Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge.”
“One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely.”
“Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep.”
“They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.”
“St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.”
“(...)on earth "everything has a beginning and nothing has an end.”
“But strange though it may seem, the more he judged, and the more he realized that men feared and acknowledged his right to judge, the more his innermost soul questioned man's right to judgment of any kind.”
“Furthermore, as long as the world shall last, there will always be people who, either for the sake of peace or from an unquiet conscience, will build up sublime lies for their neighbours. And these people have always been and will always be the masters of human thought.”
“Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
virtue, suffering, judge, dostoevsky, madness, darwin, tolstoy, soul, augustine, destruction, mad
