Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: "speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying 'we all.'" Excuse me, gentleman, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more "living" than you.
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Originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
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The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.
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He who masters the grey everyday is a hero.
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I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
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The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.
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I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.
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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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Life had stepped into the place of theory.
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I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.
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...one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.
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Know that I've forgotten precisely nothing; but I've driven it all out of my head for a time, even the memories--until I've radically improved my circumstances. Then...then you'll see, I'll rise from the dead!
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Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?...No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people's expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it--you'll find that a bit harder.
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A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
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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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So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
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What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.
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Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.
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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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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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Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!
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Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance.... Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do.... It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.
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We don't understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.
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Who doesn't desire his fathers death?