Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“24. you would rather remain with Christ than with the truth: The same sentiments are expressed in Dostoyevsky’s letter of late January-February 1854 to Natalya Fonvizina (1805–69), wife of the Decembrist Ivan Fonvizin, who followed her husband into exile. She visited Dostoyevsky and other members of the Petrashevsky Circle in the transit prison in Tobolsk, an act of kindness he remembered ever afterwards. Dostoyevsky wrote: ‘That credo is very simple, here it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more attractive, more wise, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and what’s more, I tell myself jealous with love, there cannot be. Moreover, if someone proved to me that Christ were outside the truth, and it really were that the truth lay outside Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth’ (Complete Letters, tr. D. Lowe and R. Meyer, vol. 1, p. 195).”