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When we meet, we will complain
Of our afflictions, that day,
For the feelings of the heart
No messenger can convey,
Nor is the voicing of grief
Keeping the feelings at bay.
No messenger knows
How to say what I can say.
- The Story of the Hunchback

Travel, and new friends will succeed the friends you lost,
And toil, for life's sweets do through toil come.
To stay wins you no honor nor from exile saves;
Set out to roam the world and leave your home.
When water stands, it stagnant turns and stinks
But tastes so sweet when it does flow and run.
- The Story of the Two Viziers

Many a lover his beloved tells
With his eyes’ language what is in his heart.
“I know what has befallen,” seems to say,
And with a glance he does his thoughts impart.
How lovely are the glances of the eyes,
How graceful are the eyes with passion fraught.
One with his looks a lover’s message writes,
Another with his eyes reads what his lover wrote.
- The Second Dervish’s Tale

The unrelenting Egyptian sun has bleached the gods’ once gaudy temples into romantic sand-colored tumbledown ruins. Tombs have been stripped of their treasures, pyramids of their shimmering capstones. But the allure of pharaonic civilization, embodied in the Western consciousness by its last queen, has proved altogether more resilient.

I had the river mouth prepared like a strong wall, with warships, troop carriers, and merchant vessels. They were all crewed from bow to stern with brave soldiers, fully armed. The infantry comprised every Egyptian recruit. They were like lions roaring on the mountaintops.
- Inscription of Ramesses III

Everyone who has passed by since you founded the earth,
You have raised them for your son,
The one who has come from your body,
The dual king who lives on truth, the lord of the Two Lands…the son of Ra who lives on truth,…Akhenaten, whose life is long;
And the king's great wife, whom he loves,
The lady of the Two Lands,
Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, living and youthful forever and ever.
- Great Hymn to the Aten

“I call to attention the people who shall live in the future, who shall consider this monument that I made for my father…Now my mind turned this way and that, anticipating the words of the people who shall see my monument in future years and speak of what I have done…He shall not declare what I have said to be an exaggeration. Rather, he will say, ‘How like her it is, loyal to her father!’”
- Hatshepsut

“He trod [the earth’s] end in might and victory seeking a fight, but he found no one who would stand up to him.”
“I made Egypt the chief, and the whole earth her servants.”
- Thutmose I victory inscriptions

La memoria es el deseo satisfecho
hoy que tu vida y tu destino son la misma cosa.

Decidirás, escogerás uno de los caminos, sacrificarás los demás: te sacrificarás al escoger, dejarás de ser todos los otros hombres—otro—cumpla por ti la vida que mutilaste al elegir: al elegir sí, al elegir no, al permitir que no tu deseo, idéntico a tu libertad, te señalara un laberinto sino tu interés, tu miedo, tu orgullo.

Vivir es traicionar a tu Dios; cada acto de la vida, cada acto que nos afirma como seres vivos, exige que se violen los mandamientos de tu Dios.

Que tu existencia será fabricada con todos los hilos del telar, como las vidas de todos los hombres. Que no te faltará, ni te sobrará, una sola oportunidad para hacer de tu vida lo que quieres que sea. Y si serás una cosa y no la otra, será porque, a pesar de todo, tendrás que elegir. Tus elecciones no negarán en resto de tu posible vida…hoy tu elección y tu destino serán una misma cosa.

“Some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.”
- Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love, and it will curse what it has done, for there are so many germs of good in it.”
- Fetyukovich

“In a thousand torments—I am; writhing under torture—but I am. Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there—in knowing that the sun is.”
- Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov

“No, life is full, there is life underground, too!…And besides, what is suffering? I’m not afraid of it, even if it’s numberless…And it seems to me there’s so much strength in me now that I can overcome everything, all sufferings, only in order to say and tell myself every moment: I am!”
- Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov

“You can revive and resurrect the frozen heart in this convict, you can look after him for years, and finally bring up from the cave into the light a soul that is lofty now, a suffering consciousness, you can revive an angel, resurrect a hero! And there are many of them, there are hundreds, and we’re all guilty for them!”
- Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov

“Even in there, in the mines, underground, you can find a human heart in the convict and murderer standing next to you, and you can be close to him, because there, too, it’s possible to live, and love, and suffer!“
- Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov

“Listen, Alyosha, don’t laugh, this is terribly important: is it possible for two different people to have one and the same dream?”
“It must be.”
- Liza Khokhlakov and Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“In fact you’re not like everyone else: you weren’t ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment. Do not be like everyone else; even if you are the only one left who is not like that, still do not be like that.”
- Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov to Kolya Krasotkin

“And what does it mean—ridiculous? What does it matter how many times a man is or seems to be ridiculous? Besides, nowadays almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
- Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“And I am with you, too, I won’t leave you now, I will go with you for the rest of my life,” the dear, deeply felt words of Grushenka came from somewhere near him. And his whole heart blazed up and turned towards some sort of light, and he wanted to live and live, to go on and on along some path, towards the new, beckoning light, and to hurry, hurry, right now, at once!

In certain cases, really, it is more honorable to yield to some passion, however unwise, if it springs from great love, than not to yield to it at all.

“Look at the divine gifts around us: the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that life is paradise, for we need only wish to understand, and it will come at once in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep…”
- Zosima

“Truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise.”
- Markel

“Do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over.”
- Markel

“I think that if the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
“As well as God, then.”
- Ivan and Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“I understand it all too well, Ivan: to want to love with your insides, your guts…I think that everyone should love life before everything else in this world.”
“Love life more than meaning?”
“Certainly, love it before logic…and only then will I also understand its meaning.”
Alexei and Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov

“If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced…that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos…still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I’ve drunk it all!”
- Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov

“Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it’s undefinable, and it cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles. Here the shores converge, here all the contradictions live together…So terribly many mysteries! Too many riddles oppress man on earth.
- Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov