Minghao

“Raskolnikov went out of the shed right down to the bank, sat down on the logs that were piled near the shed and began to look out at the wide, lonely river. From the high river-bank a broad panorama opened out. From the far-off opposite bank he could just make out the sound of someone singing. Over there, in the boundless steppe awash with sunlight, he could see the yurts of the nomad tribes-men like barely perceptible black dots. Over there was freedom, over there lived other people, quite different from those to lived here, over there time itself seemed to have stopped, as though the days of Abraham and his flocks had never passed.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The fate in store for you has already befallen past generations and will befall future generations no less surely. Thus one thing will never cease to rise out of another: life is granted to no one for permanent ownership, to all on lease. Look back now and consider how the bygone ages of eternity that elapsed before our birth were nothing to us. Here, then, is a mirror in which nature shows us the time to come after our death. Do you see anything fearful in it? Do you perceive anything grim? Does it not appear more peaceful than the deepest sleep?”
― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

“You see, we always think of eternity as an idea that can't be comprehended, as something enormous, gigantic! But why does it have to be so very large? I mean, instead of thinking of it that way, try supposing that all there will be is one little room, something akin to a country bath-house, with soot on the walls and spiders in every corner, and there's your eternity for you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Society also fosters in us the sense of perpetual dependence. Precisely because society has its own specific nature that is different from our nature as individuals, it pursues ends that are also specifically its own; but because it can achieve those ends only by working through us, it categorically demands our cooperation. Society requires us to make ourselves its servants, forgetful of our own interests. And it subjects us to all sorts of restraints, privations, and sacrifices without which social life would be impossible. And so, at every instant, we must submit to rules of action and thought that we have neither made nor wanted and that sometimes are contrary to our inclinations and to our most basic instincts.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life