Humanist Reflections On love,Goodness & Humanity by Fyodor Dostoevsky(Excerpts from The Brothers Karamazov)

Music:
Omar Akram – Secret Journey

Excerpts from the novel”The Brothers Karamazov”
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Brothers,have no fear of men’s sin.Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth.Love all God’s creation,the whole of it and every grain of sand in it.Love every leaf,every ray of God’s light.

Love the animals,love the plants,love everything. If you love everything,you will perceive the divine mystery in things.Once you have perceived it,you will begin to comprehend it better every day,and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love.

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy.So do not trouble it,do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy,do not go against God’s intent. Man, do not exhale yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us!

Love children especially, for like the angels they too are sinless, and they live to soften and purify our hearts,and, as it were, to guide us.Woe to him who offends a child.

My young brother asked even the birds to forgive him. It may sound absurd, but it is right none the less, for everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now.

Everything is like an ocean,I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy,and ask that they,too,should forgive your sin.Treasure this ecstasy,however absurd people may think it.

I know that heart, it is a wild but noble heart . . . It will bow down before your deed, it thirsts for a great act of love, it will catch fire and resurrect forever. There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love,and it will curse what it has done,for there are so many germs of good in it.

The soul will expand and behold how merciful God is, and how beautiful and just people are. He will be horrified, he will be overwhelmed with repentance and the countless debt he must henceforth repay. And then he will not say,’I am quits’ but will say, ‘I am guilty before all people and am the least worthy of all people.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,The Brothers Karamazov

My friends,ask gladness from God.Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man’s sin not disturb you in your efforts,do not fear that it will dampen your endeavor and keep it from being fulfilled, do not say, ‘Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless,the bad environment will dampen us and keep our good endeavor from being fulfilled.Flee from such despondency.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,The Brothers Karamazov

We don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Mindfulness and the River of feelings: Wit & Wisdom from Mary Ann Evans better known by George Eliot

Music:
GIOVANNI MARRADI-Memories<br<

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth:
it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings
beauty with it…
George Eliot,Adame Bede

The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.
George Eliot

I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven — the living only from whom men’s indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind.

While the heart beats, bruise it — it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition — make haste — oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
George Eliot,The Lifted Veil

There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.
George Eliot,Adam Bede

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.
George Eliot,Middlemarch

How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness,no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
George Eliot,Daniel Deronda

In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.
George Eliot,Daniel Deronda

Secrets of Your life by Margaret Atwood

Daniel Gerhartz Art

I wonder which is preferable,to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them,or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph,every sentence,every word of them,so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold,as close to you as your skin – everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone – and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?
Margaret Atwood

Waiting in Hope by Gustave Flaubert

Deep down in her heart, she was waiting and waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked mariner, she gazed out wistfully over the wide solitude of her life, if so be she might catch the white gleam of a sail away on the dim horizon. She knew not what it would be, this longed-for barque; what wind would waft it to her, or to what shores it would bear her away. She knew not if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, burdened with anguish or freighted with joy. But every morning when she awoke she hoped it would come that day. She listened to every sound, started swiftly from her bed, and could not understand why nothing happened. And then at sunset, more sad at heart than ever, she would long for the morrow to come.
Gustave Flaubert,Madame Bovary

Most romantic literary quotes By Charles Dickens

Music:
Richard Clayderman – Mariage d’amour

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached,
is not in my nature.I can never close my lips where
I have opened my heart.
Charles Dickens,Master Humphrey’s Clock

And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is, that O ’tis love, ’tis love, ’tis love that makes the world go round!
Charles Dickens,Our Mutual Friend

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield

A silent look of affection and regard when all other eyes are turned coldly away–the consciousness that we possess the sympathy and affection of one being when all others have deserted us–is a hold, a stay, a comfort, in the deepest affliction, which no wealth could purchase,or power bestow.
Charles Dickens,The Pickwick Papers

And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love – of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!
Charles Dickens,Dombey and Son

… Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield

Never,never,before Heaven,have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten.
Charles Dickens,Dombey and Son

I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms.
Charles Dickens,The Mystery of Edwin Drood

There lives at least one being who can never change–one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness–who lives but in your eyes–who breathes but in your smiles–who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you.
Charles Dickens,The Pickwick Papers

She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was – anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield

The unqualified truth is,that when I loved … I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.
Charles Dickens,Great Expectations

If I may so express it…I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield

I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul… and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever.

I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
Charles Dickens,A Tale of Two Cities

You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me.

You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.

But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer of myself in marringe, you could draw me to any good–every good–with equal force.
Charles Dickens,Our Mutual Friend

You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since – on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be.

To the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!’
Charles Dickens,Great Expectations

Excerpt from"The Black Monk" by Anton Chekhov

Excerpt from”The Black Monk”
Anton Chekhov

What will happen to the garden when I die? In the condition in which you see it now, it would not be maintained for one month without me. The whole secret of success lies not in its being a big garden or a great number of labourers being employed in it, but in the fact that I love the work.Do you understand? I love it perhaps more than myself. Look at me; I do everything myself.I work from morning to night: I do all the grafting myself, the pruning myself, the planting myself. I do it all myself: when any one helps me I am jealous and irritable till I am rude.

The whole secret lies in loving it– that is, in the sharp eye of the master; yes, and in the master’s hands, and in the feeling that makes one, when one goes anywhere for an hour’s visit, sit, ill at ease, with one’s heart far away, afraid that something may have happened in the garden. But when I die, who will look after it? Who will work? The gardener? The labourers? Yes? But I will tell you, my dear fellow, the worst enemy in the garden is not a hare, not a cockchafer, and not the frost, but any outside person.

Our body & our soul by Boris Pasternak

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant,systematic duplicity.Your health is bound to be affected if,day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel,if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body,and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth.It can’t be forever violated with impunity.
Boris Pasternak,Doctor Zhivago

The Silence by Anton Chekhov

I reflected how many satisfied,happy people there really are! What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying…

Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery;

but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes…Everything is so quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition…

And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible.

It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him — disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree — and all goes well.
Anton Chekhov,The Wife and other stories

Reflections On Life & Death:Being sure in death I am strong in life by D.H. Lawrence

Music:Ennio Moriccone
The Mission-Gabriel’s Oboe

Being sure in death I am strong in life
D.H. Lawrence
From”Women In Love”

When I want to move,I remember death,how it is ultimate
and inevitable,and pure.Then I am free to move properly
in life.It’s like a man who wants to think,going and
standing in front of a window.
The space purifys ones’ soul.And death is a window to me, with the darkness outside.

And when I stand there,looking out,then the world and its active life seems only like a roomful of racket and light behind me,where I am taking part for a time,but not staying for long.It does not contain me and confine me.

When I stand peacefully looking out on death,what is true in my soul disengages itself and is free and clear and untrammeled,I know what to do,I am sure,and free,and glad. Then I can turn into the world again…

When one stands in front of the darkness,and knows that one’s own life will pass away there also,into the darkness… then,in the peace that accompanies this knowledge,one can declare simply that the existing world of man is base and wrong,and must go,we know that our lives contain the inception of a new earth..

…Remembering death,I know the life of the world as it is now is not living, it is a bad process of dying.
And what we must live for is a new world of life.It doesn’t matter when we die,so long as we live fulfilling the deepest desire that is in us.And a life which is a denial of the deepest desire is much worse than any death,
it is a sheer lie.

If one accepts death and knows that nothing can take us away from that,one has the freedom and strength to live in truth, putting down the lies that pretend they own our living. But one must have the pure knowledge of death behind one, before one has really faith to tackle life and falsity.
Being sure in death I am strong in life.

Insights On life,Moral,Goodness & Love By George Eliot

Music:
Yiruma-Fotografia

Wit and Reflection from the Writings
of the novelist Mary Ann Evans
better known by her pen-name George Eliot

Diane Leonard Art

What do we live for,if it is not to make life
less difficult for each other?

It will never rain roses:
when we want to have more roses,
we must plant more roses.

It seems to me we can never give up longing
and wishing while we are still alive.
There are certain things we feel to be beautiful
and good,and we must hunger for them.
How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?
George Eliot,The Mill on the Floss

The golden moments in the stream of life rush
past us and we see nothing but sand;
the angels come to visit us,and we only know
them when they are gone.
George Eliot,Janet’s Repentance

There is much pain that is quite noiseless;and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.

There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder;robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy,yet kept secret by the sufferer-committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night,seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
George Eliot,(Felix holt,the radical)


Svetlana Belyaeva Photography

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought
that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to
reduce the sum of ignorance,degradation and misery
on the face of this beautiful earth.
George Eliot,from George Eliot’s Letters

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t
quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are
part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts
of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
George Eliot,middlemarch

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating
out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of
direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
George Eliot, Middlemarch

The presence of a noble nature,generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity,changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger,quieter masses,and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
George Eliot,Middlemarch


Richard Johnson Art

Some discouragement,some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual,and we do not expect people to be deeply moved
by what is not unusual.

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear
much of it.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat,and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot,middlemarch

What greater thing is there for two human souls,than to feel that they are joined for life–to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
George Eliot, Adam Bede

I like not only to be loved,but also to be told that I am loved.
I am not sure that you are of the same mind.But the realm of
silence is large enough beyond the grave.
This is the world of light and speech,and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
George Eliot