Lev Shestov Quotes

#1. ( ... )on earth everything has a beginning and nothing has an end.

Lev Shestov

#2. They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad. This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.

Lev Shestov

#3. Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge.

Lev Shestov

#4. Furthermore, as long as the world shall last, there will always be people who, either for the sake of peace or from an unquiet conscience, will build up sublime lies for their neighbours. And these people have always been and will always be the masters of human thought.

Lev Shestov

#5. Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness.

Lev Shestov

#6. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.

Lev Shestov

#7. More striking still, a broken man is generally deprived of everything except the ability to acknowledge and feel his position.

Lev Shestov

#8. It is not man who pursues truth, but truth man.

Lev Shestov

#9. To praise oneself is considered improper, immodest; to praise one's own sect, one's own philosophy, is considered the highest duty.

Lev Shestov

#10. But strange though it may seem, the more he judged, and the more he realized that men feared and acknowledged his right to judge, the more his innermost soul questioned man's right to judgment of any kind.

Lev Shestov

#11. Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes' clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness).

Lev Shestov

#12. But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible.

Lev Shestov

#13. If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.

Lev Shestov

#14. He did not want to be original; he made superhuman efforts to be like everybody else: but there is no escaping one's destiny.

Lev Shestov

#15. Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor.

Lev Shestov

#16. Herein lies the supreme wisdom, human and divine; and the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.

Lev Shestov

#17. This Aristotle knew definitely: the truth has the power to force or constrain men, all men alike, whether it be the great Parmenides and the great Alexander or Parmenides' unknown slave and the least of Alexander's stable-men

Lev Shestov

#18. Dostoevsky does not believe his own words, and he is trying to replace a lack of faith with "feeling" and eloquence.

Lev Shestov

#19. The story of a regeneration of convictions - can any story in the entire field of literature be more filled with thrilling and all-absorbing interest?

Lev Shestov

#20. One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely.

Lev Shestov