Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. 1: 1873-1876, ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734.
Every government explains its existence, and justifies its deeds of violence, by the argument that if it did not exist the condition of things would be very much worse. After assuring the people of its danger the government subordinates it to control, and when in this condition compels it to attack some other nation. And thus the assurance of the government is corroborated in the eyes of the people, as to the danger of attack from other nations.
Leo Tolstoy, Christianity and Patriotism (1895), as translated in The Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoï, Vol. 20, p. 44.
The best definition of man is: a biped, ungrateful.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, Vol. 1: 1873-1876, ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734.
The Law of Nemesis — the law that every extraordinary expansion or satisfaction of heart or brain or will is paid for — paid for inevitably, incommutably, without the possibility of putting off or of transferring the payment — is one of the truths about which no human being with a soul a little above the brute has the slightest doubt.
From Saintsbury’s preface to The Wild Ass’s Skin by Honoré De Balzac (New York: The Review of Reviews Company, Volume Five).
A state-imposed metaphysic or religion should be opposed, if necessary at pistol-point. We must fight for variety if we fight at all. The uniform is as dull as a sculptured egg.
From the “Obiter Dicta” attributed to the character Pursewarden, in Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar (1958), p. 245.
The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.
From George Saintsbury: The Memorial Volume (London: Methuen, 1946) p. 120.
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Lawrence Durrell, Clea (1960).
Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood, wind, and rain. Now this creature is suddenly — on the geologic scale, instantaneously — shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass, plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability but so little.
Jack Vance, “Rumfuddle,” Robert Silverberg (ed.), Three Trips in Time and Space (1973), Section 5 (p. 177).
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his own excreta.
Brian Aldiss, The Dark Light Years (1964).
The rewards for being sane are not very many but knowing what’s funny is one of them.
Kingsley Amis, Stanley and the Women. London: Hutchinson, 1984.