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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/fyodor-dostoyevsky/the-brothers-karamazov/its-just-the",
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  "text": "\"It's just the same story as a doctor once told me,\" observed the elder. \"He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. 'I love humanity,' he said, 'but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,' he said, 'I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.'\"",
  "language": "en",
  "author": {
    "name": "Fyodor Dostoyevsky",
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  "book": {
    "title": "The Brothers Karamazov",
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      "name": "human nature",
      "slug": "human-nature",
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      "name": "relationships",
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  "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:40:24",
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    {
      "id": "5e47b24e-2684-457a-8c85-4bf65bbd7c05",
      "slug": "faith-is-not",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/fyodor-dostoyevsky/the-brothers-karamazov/faith-is-not",
      "text": "Faith is not in power but in truth.",
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          "name": "truth",
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoyevsky#The_Brothers_Karamazov_(1879%E2%80%931880)",
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      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:40:25"
    },
    {
      "id": "584eae1a-4145-471c-872e-5d1a1c6f313f",
      "slug": "beauty-is-a-terrible",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/fyodor-dostoyevsky/the-brothers-karamazov/beauty-is-a-terrible",
      "text": "Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am a cultivated man, brother, but I've thought a lot about this. It's terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can't endure 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 soul does not renounce the ideal 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, indeed. I'd have 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. But a man always talks of his own ache.",
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      "id": "401df655-3dee-442f-9430-c3996c7dbd81",
      "slug": "i-am-sorry",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/fyodor-dostoyevsky/the-brothers-karamazov/i-am-sorry",
      "text": "I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead ofnearer to it — at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.",
      "language": "en",
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          "name": "love",
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