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Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Life is what matters, life alone - the continuous, eternal process of discovering life - and not the discovery itself.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice-that's what it is-they are all full of malice, malice!
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Нет бессмертия души, так нет и добродетели, значит, всё позволено. … Без бога-то и без будущей жизни? Ведь это, стало быть, теперь всё позволено, всё можно делать?
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn (and it may never learn anything else; that isn't very reassuring, but why not admit it?), while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it's nevertheless alive.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now ! I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
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.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
It wasn't the New World that mattered... Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life - the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
'You're a gentleman,' they used to say to him. 'You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman.'
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don't know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky