Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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You know, my boy, he said, it's impossible to love men such as they are. And yet we must. So try to do good to men by doing violence to your feelings, holding your nose, and shutting your eyes, especially shutting your eyes. Endure their villainy without anger, as much as possible; try to remember that you're a man too. For, if you're even a little above average intelligence, you'll have the propensity to judge people severely. Men are vile by nature and they'd rather love out of fear. Don't give in to such love: despise it always.
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And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.
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He who masters the grey everyday is a hero.
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I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.
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A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.
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Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here."
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I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.
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I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
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The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.
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--you wouldn't have hurt me like this for nothing. So what have I done? How have I wronged you? Tell me.
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If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen.
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One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
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Life had stepped into the place of theory.
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Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid!
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What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people.'
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We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is.
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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.
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Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
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They were like two enemies in love with one another.
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Being in love doesn't mean loving.
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What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be.
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Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?
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To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.
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One's own free and unfettered volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness - that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it cannot fit into any classification and the omission of which sends all systems and theories to the devil.