Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.
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Luxuries are easy to take up but very difficult to give up.
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If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.
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Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street; they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It's still possible to love one's neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.
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Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.
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If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.
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I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.
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The man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence.
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Life is what matters, life alone - the continuous, eternal process of discovering life - and not the discovery itself.
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I utter what you would not dare think.
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The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.
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Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.
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Woe to the man who offends a small child!
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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.
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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.
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On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
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What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
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I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.
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If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man ... just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.
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People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
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Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!
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In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.
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I have never in my life met a man like him for noble simplicity, and boundless truthfulness. I understood from the way he talked that anyone who chose could deceive him, and that he would forgive anyone afterwards who had deceived him, and that was why I grew to love him.
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The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all.