A Confession quotes

I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith.

I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth. But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.

Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged.

Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger, and revenge⁠—were all respected.

Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and felt that they approved of me.

It was explained in this theory that this need not be known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very natural for me to adopt this theory.

I, artist and poet, wrote and taught without myself knowing what.

For this I was paid money; I had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame, which showed that what I taught was very good.

And I could find no reply at all. The questions would not wait, they had to be answered at once, and if I did not answer them it was impossible to live. But there was no answer.

I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet.

What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.

My life came to a standstill.

I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable.

My life came to a standstill.

I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life

, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it.

Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? … How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising!

One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!

That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung.

I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet.

I only saw the unescapable dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them, and this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all.

Nor was that all. Had I simply understood that life had no meaning I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that.

Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.

He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still he cannot help rushing about.

it is not only agreement with what has been told one (as faith is most usually supposed to be), but faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives.

Faith is the strength of life.

If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite;

All these conceptions in which the finite has been adjusted to the infinite and a meaning found for life—the conception of God, of will, of goodness—we submit to logical examination. And all those conceptions fail to stand reason’s criticism.

Were it not so terrible it would be ludicrous with what pride and self-satisfaction we, like children, pull the watch to pieces, take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then surprised that the watch does not go.

A solution of the contradiction between the finite and the infinite, and such a reply to the question of life as will make it possible to live, is necessary and precious.

I understood that I had erred, and why I erred.

I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly.

I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it.

I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now;

I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.

What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him.

I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. “What more do you seek?” exclaimed a voice within me. “This is He. He is that without which one cannot live.

To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.

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