Truly, I tell you: if a grain of wheat falls to the ground and does not die, it remains a grain; if it dies, it will bear many seeds.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
John 12:24
This is the first miracle that occurred in Cana of Galilee! Ah, this is a miracle, a lovely miracle! Christ did not come to visit suffering, but to celebrate people’s joyous occasions; this time He creates a miracle to add a festive atmosphere for people… “He who loves men must also love people’s joy…” These are the words the elder often said in his lifetime… All sincere, beautiful things are always permeated with tolerance—this is also what the elder often said…
He who loves men loves their gladness, too.
You will step out of the courtyard walls, and in the world of mortals you will live like a monk. You will have many enemies, but even your enemies will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, yet you will find happiness in those misfortunes; you will bless life and inspire others to do the same—this is more important than anything.
Freedom, free thought, and science will leave them dizzy and confused. Faced with such inexplicable miracles and unsolvable secrets, a rebellious portion of them will destroy themselves, another portion, though not tame but not strong enough, will destroy each other, and the remaining third, weak and pitiful, will crawl to our feet and plead: “Yes, you’re right, only you hold the secret, we want to come back to your side, save us from our own torment!”
The flock will regroup, become tame again and forever tame. Then we will give them tranquil, gentle happiness, give them the happiness of the weak, because they are born weak.
We will prove to them that they are weak, that they are merely pitiful children, yet a child’s happiness is the sweetest. They will become timid and shy, trembling and chirping at us, leaning toward us like chicks snuggling their mother hen. They will be astonished by us, sincere and fearful, and proud that we are so powerful, so intelligent, able to make such restless billions of sheep bow down obediently.
You yearn for a love of freedom, not the flattering, ecstatic adulation of a slave confronting an authority that completely subdues him.
For humans, tranquility—even death—is more valuable than the freedom to choose in discerning good from evil. What most appeals to people is the freedom of their conscience, yet what torments them most is precisely that.
“ I think, if there is no devil in the world, then it is humans who created the devil, humans who fashioned the devil in their own image.”
“ In other words, just like God.”
All I want is to keep living; I stubbornly stay alive, even if it doesn’t make sense. Though I don’t believe the cosmos is orderly, I cherish the sticky, spring‑sprouting leaves, I cherish the blue sky, I cherish, sometimes even I don’t know—believe it or not—why I love certain people, I cherish some of humanity’s great deeds; perhaps I no longer believe in such grand achievements, yet out of old convictions I sincerely hold them in respect.
I have long decided not to try to understand anything. If I try to understand something, I would immediately stray from the facts, so I decided to stand on the side of facts.
He just opened a tiny part of his heart, then suddenly got embarrassed, regretting that he had exposed his entire soul to me. So he immediately hated me to death. In fact, he belongs to the extremely shy, pitiful type.
His main reason for being angry is: he regarded me as a friend and lowered his guard against me—the process was too fast.
Lise, for someone who is being treated unjustly, having everyone come out to act as his benefactor is unbearable…
“Now the main thing is to make him believe that, even though he has taken our money, he and all of us are still on equal footing,” Alyosha continued smugly, “not only equal, but even a step above…”
But falling in love with someone does not equal loving them. Even if you hate a person, you can also fall in love with that person at the same time.
Some people have noble hearts and outstanding wisdom; the beauty in their eyes begins with a sacred ideal and ends with an embodiment of fleshly desire.
However, once the nonsense was spoken, he felt it was too outrageous, and a sudden whimsical idea struck him, prompting him to immediately prove to those present—especially to himself—that he was not merely babbling. Although he knew very clearly that if he kept going, he would add even more absurd nonsense to what had already been uttered, he could no longer turn back, so he plunged straight down from the mountain peak.
Yet his feigned passion had such a strong contagion on him that, in the blink of an eye, he almost believed it to be true, moved to the point of almost crying. But at that very moment, he realized that it was time to withdraw and return to camp.
Some lifelong liars and seasoned actors experience moments like this; they become so fully immersed in the role that they actually get angry, trembling and shedding tears. In fact, at that very instant (or perhaps just a moment later), they silently tell themselves, “You are obviously insincere, shameless old thing; even now you are still acting, even though you have seized the ‘sacred’ moment of outburst and displayed ‘sacred’ anger.”
The love imagined in dreams is one of quick results and instant gratification, yearning to achieve feats that attract everyone’s attention. With such a dream, one is even willing to sacrifice one’s life, as long as the process doesn’t last long and ends quickly like on a stage, as long as everyone watches and praises it. Real love, however, requires work and perseverance; for some people, perhaps it is even a discipline.
Howling and crying can only provide a fleeting sense of relief, but its price is further stimulating and tearing the wounds in the heart. Such sorrow even refuses comfort from others; it knows it cannot be freed, so it simply attacks pain with pain. Howling and crying is merely a need to continuously stimulate the wound.
Lying to oneself and listening to one’s own lies will lead to this state: whether within oneself or around, even if truth is present, one cannot discern it, resulting in neither self‑respect nor respect for others.
If a person does not respect anyone, then there is no love; in the absence of love, seeking pleasure is nothing but indulging in carnal desires, indulging in primitive sensory enjoyment, completely falling into the mire of sin and becoming bestial, and it all starts with continual lying to others and to oneself.
People who lie to themselves are the most prone to sulking. You should know that sulking can sometimes be quite enjoyable, right?
A person clearly knows that no one has offended him, yet he baselessly imagines he has been offended, spews nonsense and pretends to be affected, exaggerates details to confuse others, grabs snippets of words and makes a big deal out of them—he knows all this himself, yet he still gets sulky at the slightest provocation, sulking with relish, finding endless joy in it, until he truly harbors resentment…
Stand up again, sit down, I earnestly ask you, know that all this is also a false posture…
In many cases, sacrificing oneself may be the easiest of all sacrifices, while taking five or six years out of one’s vibrant life to study diligently, to pursue some scholarship, even if only to increase one’s power tenfold in order to serve the truth he pursues, to serve the great cause he yearns for and has taken upon himself — such a sacrifice is almost completely unattainable for many of them; the reality is often like that.
There was a young lady belonging to an earlier so‑called “Romantic” generation, who could have married the man she loved at any time in a smooth, proper manner, but after several years of mysterious romance she imagined all sorts of insurmountable obstacles. As a result, on a night of raging wind and storm, she leapt from a sheer, cliff‑like high bank into the deep, swift currents below, dying purely of her own thoughts, merely to imitate Ophelia from Shakespeare’s play.
One could even say that if the rock wall she had long admired had not been so steep and dramatic, but merely a gentle, ordinary riverbank, perhaps the suicide would never have occurred at all.
Religious Chief Justice, the defense of authoritarianism