Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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If he's alive, everything is in his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn't understand that?
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I don't need money, or, better, it's not money that I need; it's not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over!
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If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen.
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What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
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And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.
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Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
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I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.
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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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Originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
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- What is a Socialist? - That's when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no marriages, and everyone has any religion and laws he likes best. You are not old enough to understand that yet.
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Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.
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Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.
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Oh I've plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.
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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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But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.
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On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering.
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It was evident that he revived by fits and starts. He would suddenly come to himself from actual delirium for a few minutes; he would remember and talk with complete consciousness, chiefly in disconnected phrases which he had perhaps thought out and learnt by heart in the long weary hours of his illness, in his bed, in sleepless solitude.
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What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
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Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.
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That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.
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Let us first fulfill Christ's injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves.
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It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated.
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He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.
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Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.