"Oh, stop it, Liovushka," said Leo Nicolayevitch irritably, "you are annoying. You hammer away like a parrot at one word, freedom, freedom; but what is the sense of it? If you attained your freedom, what do you imagine would happen? In the philosophic sense, a bottomless void, and in actual life you would become an idler, a parasite. If you were free in your sense, what would bind you to life or to people? Now, birds are free, but still they build nests; you, however, wouldn't even build a nest, but would gratify your sexual feeling anywhere, like a dog. You think seriously, and you will come to see, you will come to feel, that this freedom is ultimately emptiness, boundlessness."
He frowned angrily, was silent for a while, and then added quietly, "Christ was free and so was Buddha, and both took on themselves the sins of the world and voluntarily entered the prison of earthly life. Further than that nobody has gone, nobody. And you—we—well, what's the good of talking—we are all looking for freedom from obligations towards our fellow men, whereas it is just that feeling of our obligations which has made us men, and, if those obligations were not there, we should live like the beasts."
He smiled. "And now here we are arguing how we ought to live. The result isn't very great, but it is something. For instance, you are arguing with me, and are getting so cross that you are going blue in the nose, yet you don't hit me, you don't even swear at me. But if you really felt free, you'd kill me on the spot, and there'd be an end of it." After a silence, he added: "Freedom consists in all and everything agreeing with me, but in that case I don't exist, because we are only conscious of ourselves in conflicts and contradictions,">[
IV
Goldenweiser played Chopin, which called forth these remarks from Leo Nicolayevitch: "A certain German princeling said: 'Where you want to have slaves, there you should have as much music as possible.' That's a true thought, a true observation—music dulls the mind. Especially do the Catholics realize that; our priests, of course, won't reconcile themselves to Mendelssohn in church. A Tula priest assured me that Christ was not a Jew, though the son of the Jewish God and his mother a Jewess—he did admit that, but says he: 'It's impossible.' I asked him: 'But how then? 'He shrugged his shoulders and said: 'That's just the mystery.'"
V
"An intellectual is like the old Galician Prince Vladimirko, who, as far back as the twelfth century, 'boldly' declared: 'There are no miracles in our time.' Six hundred years have passed and all the intellectuals hammer away at each other: 'There are no miracles, there are no miracles.' And all the people believe in miracles, just as they did in the twelfth century."
VI
"The minority feel the need of God because they have got everything else, the majority because they have nothing."
I would put it differently: the majority believe in God from cowardice, only the few believe in him from fullness of soul.