Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
-
Woe to the man who offends a small child!
-
Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.
-
Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
-
If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen.
-
From a hundred rabbits you can't make a horse.
-
Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.
-
You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?
-
The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else - something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.
-
Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.
-
Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable, but desirable. They mean growth. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
-
The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.
-
Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.
-
Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.
-
One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice-however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy-is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms... [an]will attain his object-that is, convince himself he is a man and not a piano-key!
-
Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other 'higher' ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.
-
For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!
-
No, I can't admit it. Brother,' said Alyosha suddenly, with flashing eyes, 'you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could firgive? But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, "Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!
-
I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.
-
I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus.
-
In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.
-
The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly.
-
The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.
-
My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?
-
Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously.