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Quote by Mikhail Epstein

“Other feelings too can be philosophical—pain, grief, tedium, delight, exultation—if they are experienced on behalf of humankind. “I looked around me, and my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind” is the opening of Alexander Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (1790), which laid the foundation of all subsequent Russian philosophy. It is a philosophy shaped by feelings of suffering and compassion, by the Karamazovian question of how to justify a child’s tears. The range of philosophical feelings is wide.”

Quote by Mikhail Epstein

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Mikhail Epstein

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“At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”

“But I guess you have to get cracked wide open and exposed raw to become your best self. Nothing is transformed that is not discovered or exposed. And we are all constant imperfection in a state of evolution until we leave this place. It seems important to acknowledge that none of us, not even the greatest gurus of our time, are completely transformed. It's a great unraveling across a lifetime that is only accessed by the cracks in our ever-present false selves.”