There is no official line, and the most beautiful is a matter of the reader's taste, but three passages about love deserve to be read: the end of Crime and Punishment, the idea of active love, and the definition of hell given by the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov.
The first is from the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, in Siberia, falls weeping at Sonia's feet, and the narrator says: "Love resurrected them: the heart of one held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other." It is the sentence in which the book trades theory for life, but Sonia's Gospel stays closed and the renewal is deferred to a new story that the novel does not tell. For this reason the line supports two readings: that love is enough, or that the book only announces it.
The second is from Zosima, to a lady who says she loves humanity but confesses she would stop loving if faced with the ingratitude of those she cares for. In our translation, he says that "active love, compared with dreamed-of love, is a hard and frightening thing," and that active love "is labor and perseverance." It is beautiful because it does not console.
The third is the question Zosima asks himself, what hell is, and his answer: "The suffering of no longer being able to love." Whoever seeks consolation will stay with the first passage; whoever prefers clarity will keep the other two.
On Clavis: Crime and Punishment.
Sources
- Wikipedia (inglês): Crime and Punishment
- Wikisource (russo): Crime e Castigo, Epílogo, capítulo II (texto original)
- Wikisource (russo): Os Irmãos Karamázov, Livro II, capítulo IV (texto original)
- Wikisource (russo): Os Irmãos Karamázov, Livro VI, capítulo III (texto original)
- Wikipedia (inglês): The Brothers Karamazov