Dostoevsky on Education

While it isn't quite so explicitly about graduate education as I would like to think, I found this passage from The Brothers Karamazov particularly enlightening.

[Introducing Alyosha]

" . . . he was partly a young man of our time - that is, honest by nature, demanding of truth, seeking it and believing it, and in that belief demanding an immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life.

Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish - such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them."