Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
-
I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.
-
In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.
-
Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.
-
For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.
-
And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
-
It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!
-
If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.
-
Speak of a wolf and you see his tail!
-
What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.
-
My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.
-
In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.
-
No, evidently habit means a lot. The devil knows what habit can do to a person.
-
To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.
-
I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
-
Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.
-
Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?
-
Two and two make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies.
-
A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.
-
Make us your slaves, but feed us.
-
Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.
-
My friends, God is necessary for me if only because he is the one being who can be loved eternally.
-
I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child's tormentor: 'Just art thou, O Lord!' but I do not want to cry out with them. While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!
-
Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.
-
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.