All we Karamazovs are such insects. And angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest - worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets before us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not an educated nor cultured man, Alyosha, but I've thought a lot about this. It's terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad. I'd have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Some Similar Quotes
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  2. Buy a gift for a dog, and you'll be amazed at the way it will dance and swerve its tail, but if don't have anything to offer to it, it won't even recognize your arrival; such are the attributes of fake friends. - Michael Bassey Johnson

  3. May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. - George Carlin

  4. When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. - Lao Tzu

  5. We are supposed to call poison medicine and we wonder why we're always sick. - Stefan Molyneux

More Quotes By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  1. Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having...

  2. What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

  3. The soul is healed by being with children.

  4. I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.

  5. To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

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