Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license.
“Love life more than the meaning of it.”
Source: The Brothers Karamazov (Bratři Karamazovi)
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky 155
Russian author 1821–1881Related quotes
“Alliance does not mean love, any more than war means hate.”
Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948)
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), p. 67
Context: For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 51.
Discipleship (1937), Costly Grace
Context: The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that.