Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts.
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But how could you live and have no story to tell?
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There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.
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Ivan is the incarnation of the refusal to be the only one saved. He throws in his lot with the damned and, for their sake, rejects eternity. If he had faith, he could, in fact, be saved, but others would be damned and suffering would continue. There is no possible salvation for the man who feels real compassion.
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For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?
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One can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan't understand them thoroughly.
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I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don't succeed, I quit!
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In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall.
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...it all, maybe, most likely, indeed, might turn out for the best.
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There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
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... active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one's life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and eveyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.
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Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.
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For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.
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In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.
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They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?
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I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings - of what? Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.
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It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.
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Be the sun and all will see you.
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Money is coined liberty.
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If not reason, then the devil.
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The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!
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The soul is healed by being with children.
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A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
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The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!