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Realists do not fear the results of their study.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, i don't know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine. What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
..., twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Why count the days, when even one days is enough for a man to know all happiness?
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Reason is the slave of passion.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Do a man dirt, yourself you hurt.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
What is the use of Christ's words, unless we set an example?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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'Ever seen a leaf - a leaf from a tree?' 'Yes.' I saw one recently - a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining ...' 'What's this - an allegory?' "No; why? Not an allegory - a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything's good.'
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
He walked on without resting. He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him - he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him... .
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
There is no virtue if there is no immortality.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.
Fyodor Dostoevsky