Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!
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Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
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What matters," said the prince at last, "is that you have a child's trusting nature and extraordinary truthfulness. Do you know that a great deal can be forgiven you for that alone?
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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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The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.
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Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
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God knows what lives in me in place of me.
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They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
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One could never judge a man without seeing him close, for oneself.
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One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!
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I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.
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Then Christ will say to us, 'Come you also! Come you drunkards! Come you weaklings! Come you depraved!' And he will say to us, 'Vile creatures, you in the image of the beast and you who bear his mark. All the same, you come too!' And the wise and prudent will say, 'Lord, why are you welcoming them? And he will say, 'O wise and prudent, I am welcoming them because not one of them has ever judged himself worthy. And he will stretch out his arms to us, and we shall fall at his feet, and burst into sobs, and then we shall understand everything, everything! Lord, your kingdom come!
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I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.
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I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.
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What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
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I've always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I've been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I've looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.
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Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.
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You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.
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Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
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We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.
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It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!
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In such situations, of course, people don't nurse their anger silently, they moan aloud; but these are not frank, straightforward moans, there is a kind of cunning malice in them, and that's the whole point. Those very moans express the sufferer's delectation; if he did not enjoy his moans, he wouldn't be moaning.
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By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self – forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.
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In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.