Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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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!
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Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.
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Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.
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The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.
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It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was.
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From a hundred rabbits you can't make a horse.
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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.
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After all, bluff and real emotion exist so easily side by side.
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The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.
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Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.
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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.
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Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.
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Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.
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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?
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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?
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The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.
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Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.
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You don't need free will to determine that twice two is four. That's not what i call free will.
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People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
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Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harrass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
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Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.
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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!
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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.
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Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness.