ceci

“For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms. I’ve already mentioned this above. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow minded. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. So,”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“A man cannot serve two masters: so it is either reason or the scriptures.

- On Religion”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

“So much have we lost touch with 'real life' that we occasionally feel a kind of disgust for it and so can't bear to be reminded of it. For we have arrived at the point where we look on 'real life' as toil, almost as compulsory service, and all of us privately agree that 'life' as we find it in book is better.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground