“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky 155

Russian author 1821–1881

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“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am a cultivated man, brother, 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 them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can’t endure 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, indeed. 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. But a man always talks of his own ache.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

“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 (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

“One quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better.”

Thomas Harris (1940) American author and screenwriter

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992)
Source: Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“To this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) Royal Navy officer and explorer

Journal, 17 January 1912 http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/diaries/scottslastexpedition/page/7/, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition (1913) vol.1, ch.18

“It's a terrible thing to go through life thinking that you have a rock on your side when you haven't.”

Maria Callas (1923–1977) American-born Greek operatic soprano

“There is nothing that exists that has only one side. Even a piece of paper, thin as it is, has two sides.”

Terry Goodkind (1948) American novelist

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Source: Duino Elegies (1922)
Context: Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them
pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

“Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.”

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky 155

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