The Brothers Karamazov

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

It is a book that involves morality, love, and spirituality. It is a crime story with the morals of the characters being put on trial.

🎨 Impressions

I found it to be the same as all books by Russian authors. Half the book is people making up new nicknames for each other and the other half is obscure references to Pusjkin.

How I Discovered It

It is known for being one of the best novels of all time.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I was not that impressed, and I think the problem was that I used too much time to read the book and never got immersed in the book.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• It was the French existentialist Albert Camus who said that Dostoevsky not Karl Marx was the great prophet of the twentieth century.

• No less interestingly, though more difficult to fathom, Albeit Einstein declared that he had learnt more from Dostoevsky than from any other thinker.

• As a father he did precisely what was expected of him; that is, he totally and utterly abandoned his child by Adelaide Ivanovna, not out of malice towards him and not from any wounded matrimonial feelings, but simply because he totally forgot about him.

• “It’s precisely the time,” cried Fyodor Pavlovich, “and my son Dmitri Fyodorovich still isn’t here! I apologize for him, sacred elder!” (Alyosha cringed all over at this “sacred elder. “) “I myself am always very punctual, to the minute, remembering that punctuality is the courtesy of kings. “Not that you’re a king,” muttered Miusov, unable to restrain himself in time.

• “I’ll tell you why: he never did anything to me, it’s true, but I once played a most shameless nasty trick on him, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.”

• “for every woman is without honor,” and that they should not leave their former master, whatever sort he was, “for it was now their duty.”

• But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.

• Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it’s undefinable, and it cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles.

• For me, money is an accessory, a fever of the soul, an ambience.

• “I blushed not at your words, and not at your deeds, but because I’m the same as you.”

• “But I’m sure she does love a man like you, and not a man like him.” “She loves her own virtue, not me,”

• “I’ll be her husband, I’ll have the honor of being her spouse, and if a lover comes, I’ll go to another room. I’ll clean her friends’ dirty galoshes, I’ll heat up the samovar, I’ll run errands ...”

• “There would be no civilization at all if God had not been invented.” “There wouldn’t? Without God?” “Right. And there would be no cognac either. But even so, we’ll have to take your cognac away from you.”

• “Brother, let me ask you one more thing: can it be that any man has the right to decide about the rest of mankind, who is worthy to live and who is more unworthy?” “But why bring worth into it? The question is most often decided in the hearts of men not at all on the basis of worth, but for quite different reasons, much more natural ones. As for rights, tell me, who has no right to wish?”

• I, my dearest Alexei Fyodorovich, plan to live on this earth as long as possible, let it be known to you, and therefore I need every kopeck, and the longer I live, the more I’ll need it,”

• Wickedness is sweet: everyone denounces it, but everyone lives in it, only they all do it on the sly and I do it openly

• “You’re not an evil man, you’re just twisted,” Alyosha smiled.

• Den Dank, Dame, begehr ich nicht,”

• Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they’re God’s angels, but together, especially in school, they’re quite often merciless.

• “Yes, together, together! From now on, always together, for the whole of our lives. Listen, kiss me, I allow you to.” Alyosha kissed her.

• “Alyoshka,” laughed Ivan, “don’t get into arguments about love! It’s unseemly for you.

• “I shall not die before I have once more drunk deeply of conversation with you, beloved of my heart, before I have looked upon your dear faces and poured out my soul to you once more.”

• Why count the days, when even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness.

• I ask myself: “What is hell?” And I answer thus: “The suffering of being no longer able to love.”

• Moreover, it was even quite the opposite: all his dismay arose precisely because his faith was so great.

• Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered: now take that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it, and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise, but if the onion breaks, she can stay where she is. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away.

• Jealousy!”Othello is not jealous, he is trustful,” Pushkin observed, and this one observation already testifies to the remarkable depth of our great poet’s mind.

• “Ready? Let’s go!” Mitya got into a flutter. “Yet one last tale and then even if he’s lying— and he lies all the time—he’s lying so as to give pleasure to us all: that’s not mean, is it?*

• The chorus broke into “Ah, hallway, my hallway!”

• “Voltaire believed in God, but very little, it seems, and it seems he also loved mankind very little,” Alyosha said softly,

• “When you’re older, you will see yourself what significance age has upon convictions. It also occurred to me that you were using words that weren’t yours,”

• Les femmes tricottent: “Women are knitters.”

• “I despise you?” Alyosha looked at him with surprise. “But what for? I’m only sad that such a lovely nature as yours, which has not yet begun to live, should already be perverted by all this crude nonsense.”

• ‘Show a Russian schoolboy a chart of the heavens,’ he writes, ‘of which hitherto he had no idea at all, and the next day he will return the chart to you with corrections.’

• Like a Swede at Poltava

• Thomas believed not because he saw the risen Christ but because he wanted to believe even before that.

• And, after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also a proof of God?

• Je pense donc je suis: “I think, therefore I am,” the well-known phrase of the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650).

• Après moi le déluge: “after me the flood,” attributed to Louis XV, and also to his favorite, the Marquise de Pompadour.

• It is better to let ten who are guilty go, than to punish one who is innocent— do you hear, do you hear this majestic voice from the last century of our glorious history?