Fyodor Dostoevsky
In the person I hated most today, was there not also a fragment of me?
📝ONGO's Reflection
Dostoevsky was dragged to the execution ground and pardoned at the final moment. It is no exaggeration to say those five minutes made all of his novels. His characters — murderers, prostitutes, madmen alike — are, in their deepest depths, loving something. He saw the angel and the demon fighting on the same ground within a human being, and he did not look away from that fight. His insight that, when we look into the person we hate most, we find a part of them within us too is the greatest medicine for our age, so prone to the easy outrage of social media.
"To love a person means to see him as God intended him to be."Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Book V
🌱Apply It Today
Recall the one person who irritated you most today, and for just one minute imagine what fear, loneliness, or mistake might lie behind that behavior. Like one of Dostoevsky's characters, that person too is no simple villain.
