Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
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Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.
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If God does not exist, everything is permitted.
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When… in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?
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Hell is the inability to love.
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You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
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You did not come down from the cross when they shouted to you, mocking and reviling you: "Come down from the cross and we will believe that it is you." You did not come down because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous...I swear, man is created weaker and baser than you thought him! How, how can he ever accomplish the same things as you? ...Respecting him less, you would have demanded less of him, and that would be closer to love, for his burden would be lighter.
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It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.
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Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it’s not true and that it’s blushing just as I am now, all over.
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Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
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People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.
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Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent.
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It's easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.
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Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it.
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Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.
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Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.
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Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
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Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.
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It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.
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A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.
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‘No one but you and one ‘jade’ I have fallen in love with, to my ruin. But being in love doesn’t mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.
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The world will be saved by beauty.
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The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
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There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one's own, to be precisely "like other people.