I love mankind...but I marvel at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love human beings in particular, separately, as individual persons. In my dreams...I would often arrive at fervent plans of devotion to mankind and might very possibly have gone to the Cross for human beings, had that been suddenly required of me, and yet I am unable to spend two days in the same room with someone else...No sooner is that someone else close to me than his personality...hampers my freedom. In the space of a day and a night I am capable of coming to hate even the best of human beings: one because he takes too long over dinner, another because he has a cold and is perpetually blowing his nose...To compensate for this, however, it has always happened that the more I have hated human beings in particular, the more ardent has become my love for mankind in general.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
(from bk 2, ch 4)
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