"Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird--spring, however, was still spring. . . All were happy--plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people--adult men and women--never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to all creatures to enjoy--a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love. No, what they considered sacred and important were their own devices for wielding power over each other" (19)."If he had been asked why he considered himself superior to the majority of mankind he would have been unable to find an answer, no facet of his life being distinguished for any particular qualities . . . And yet he was undoubtedly conscious of being superior, and accepted as his due the respect paid to him, and was hurt when he did not get it" (39-40).
"During that summer at his aunt' Nekhlyudov experienced that rapturous state of exaltation when a young man discovers for himself, without any outside recommendation, all the beauty and significance of life, and the importance of the task allotted in life to every man; when he sees the endless perfectibility of himself and the whole universe; and devotes himself not only hopefully but in complete confidence to attaining the perfection he dreams of" (68).
"And all this terrible change had come about simply because he had ceased to put faith in his own conscience and had taken to trusting others. And he had ceased to trust himself and begun to believe in others because life was too difficult if one believed one's own conscience: believing in oneself, every question had to be decided, never to the advantage of one's animal self, which seeks easy gratifications, but in almost every case against it. But to believe in others meant that there was nothing to decide: everything had been decided already, and always in favor of the animal I and against the spirtual. Moreover, when he trusted his own conscience he was always laying himself open to criticism, whereas now, trusting others, he received the approval of those aroung him . . .
. . . and all this time he felt the delight of being liberated from the moral restraint he had formerly accepted for himself, and lived in a continuous mad state of chronic selfishness" (74, 77).
"The distance was so great, the defilement so complete, that at first he despaired of the possibility of being cleansed. 'Haven't you tried before to improve and be better, and nothing came of it?' whispered the voice of the tempter within. 'So what is the use of trying any more? You are not the only one--everyone's the same--life is like that,' whispered the voice. . . . However vast the disparity between what he was and what he wished to be, everything appeared possible to this newly awakened spiritual being . . .
He prayed, asking God to help him, to enter into him and cleanse him . . . He felt himself one with Him, and therefore was conscious not only of the freedom, the courage and joy of life, but of all the power of righteousness. All, all the best a man could do, he now felt himself capable of doing . . .
Nekhyludov gazed at the moonlit garden, the roof and the shadow of the poplar, and drank in the fresh invigorating air.
'How good, how good, O Lord, how good!' he said of what was in his soul" (141-3).
"He was not guilty of an evil act, but there was something far worse than an evil action: there were thoughts which give birth to bad deeds. An evil act need not be repeated and can be repented of, but evil thoughts engender evil acts. A bad act only smoothes the path for other bad acts, whereas evil thoughts drag one irresistibly along the path" (374-5).
"'The animal nature of man is abominable,' he thought, 'but so long as it remains undisguised you can look down on it from the heights of your spiritual life and despise it, and whether you succumb or resist, you remain what you were before; but when this animality is concealed under a pseudoaesthetic, poetic veil and demands adulation--then in worshipping the animal you become engulfed in it and can no longer distinguish good from evil. Then it is awful' "(391).
"Then he used to devise things to do, which always centered round one and the same person--Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhyudov; and yet, notwithstanding the fact that all the interests of life had Dmitri Ivanovich as their pivot he was bored with all of them. Now everything he did concerned other people, and not Dmitri Ivanovich, and they were all interesting and absorbing, and there was no end to them . . . the affairs of Dmitri Ivanovich always made him feel peevish and irritable; whereas now being busy for other people generally put him in a happy frame of mind" (399).
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