Home

Quote of the Day

If you enjoy programming, philosophy, math, or any number of geeky topics, you're in the right place. Every day, I'll post a random quote from my extensive collection of Kindle highlights. Quotes do not necessarily reflect my views or opinions. In fact, part of my epistemic process is to consume a wide variety of contradictory material.

11/01/2024

And not only we but the whole of Europe marvels, on such occasions, at our Russian passion: if one of us embraces Catholicism, then he’s bound to become a Jesuit, and of the most underground sort at that; if he becomes an atheist, he is bound to start demanding the eradication of belief in God by force, which means by the sword! Why is that, why is there such frenzy all at once? You really don’t know? Because he has found his fatherland, which he had missed here, and he rejoices; he has found the shore, the land, and he rushes to kiss it! It’s not only from vainglory, not only from nasty, vainglorious feelings that Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits proceed, but from spiritual pain, spiritual thirst, from the longing for a lofty cause, a firm shore, a native land, in which we’ve ceased to believe because we’ve never known it!

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

Discuss this quote