Echoes

To see what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.

Idleness and lack of occupation tend — nay are dragged — towards evil.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.

My life is my message.

What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, — nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

'But,' I [Dmitri Karamazov] asked, 'how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?' 'Didn't you know?' he said. And he laughed. 'Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,' he said.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

An action committed in anger is an action doomed to failure.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing.

Go forth in virtue!

It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.

For one man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.

It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes, is the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates.

Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.

The price of greatness is responsibility.