Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
-
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
-
There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
-
The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.
-
We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast?
-
From a hundred rabbits you can't make a horse.
-
I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.
-
I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.
-
Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.
-
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.
-
People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
-
Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.
-
Man is bound to lie about himself.
-
Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.
-
And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
-
After all, bluff and real emotion exist so easily side by side.
-
In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.
-
The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.
-
If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you.
-
The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.
-
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.
-
There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself - but you just can't help it.
-
The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.
-
Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. [...] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
-
But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.