More Dostoyevsky

This book is so amazingly quotable.  When reading it, I get the feeling that Dostoyevsky had so much to say about life and the world, that he felt responsible for putting so eloquently what each of us feels.

I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.   What's still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his heart does not renounce the idea of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence.  Yes, man is broad, too broad.  I'd make him narrower.  The devil only knows what to make of it!  What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart.  Is there beauty in Sodom?  Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom.  Did you know that secret?  The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.  God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.