Page 1718 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

He had lived (without being aware of it) on those
spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother’s
milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition
of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by
virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.
‘What should I have been, and how should I have
spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not
known that I must live for God and not for my own
desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing
of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have
existed for me.’ And with the utmost stretch of
imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he
would have been himself, if he had not known what he
was living for.
‘I looked for an answer to my question. And thought
could not give an answer to my question—it is
incommensurable with my question. The answer has been
given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right
and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at
in any way, it was given to me as to all men, GIVEN,
because I could not have got it from anywhere.
‘Where could I have got it? By reason could I have
arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not

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