Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes - Page 6

If God does not exist, everything is permitted.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Strength, strength is what I need; nothing can be done without strength; and strength must be gained by strength.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Though these young men unhappily fail tounderstand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest ofall sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years oftheir seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiplytenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have setbefore them as their goal--such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strengthof many of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Never for one minute have I taken you for reality . . . You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But profound as psychology is, it's a knife that cuts both ways (...). I have purposely resorted to this method, gentlemen of the jury, to show that you can prove anything by it. It all depends on who makes use of it. Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously. I am speaking of the abuse of psychology, gentlemen.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! 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.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man is a vile creature!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don't be surprised that I value prejudice, observe certain conventions, seek power--it's because I know I live in an empty society.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones!The Brothers KaramazovIvan to Alyosha, on the suffering and torture of children, "Book V - Pro and Contra, Chapter 4 - Rebellion.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Children can be told anything—anything. I've always been struck by seeing how little grown-up people understand children, how little parents even understand their own children. Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they are little and that it is too early for them to understand. What a miserable and unfortunate idea! And how readily the children detect that their fathers consider them too little to understand anything, though they understand everything. Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Woe to the man who offends a small child!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained—something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know;
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Does it matter whether it was a dream or a reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It was more difficult not tounderstand than to understand.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Feeling my own humiliation in my heart like the sharp prick of a needle.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
For though your mind is active enough, your heart is darkened with corruption, and without a pure heart there can be no full or genuine sensibility.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Why is it that a convict never saves his money? Well, not only is it difficult for him to keep it, but prison life is so miserable that a man, of his very nature, thirsts for freedom of action. His position in society makes him so irregular a being that the idea of swallowing up his capital in orgies, of intoxicating himself with revelry, seems to him quite natural if only he can procure himself one moment's forgetfulness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I was overpowered by the mere sensation of that dream and it alone survived in my sorely wounded heart.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you already because of the lies I had told you. Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be their nature.- Yes; it's a funny habit.- No, it's not funny; you are wrong there. There's nothing funny in nature, however funny it may seem to man. If dogs could reason and criticize us they'd be sure to find just as much that would be funny to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their masters -far more, I think. I am more convinced that there is far more foolishness among us.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature, especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his companions. The conventional answer to this question is: 'He begot you, and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.' The youth involuntarily reflects: 'But did he love me when he begot me?' he asks, wondering more and more. 'Was it for my sake he begot me? He did not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion, perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity to drunkenness- that's all he's done for me.... Why am I bound to love him simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life after?Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. 'Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window'.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Eh, brother, but nature has to be corrected and guided, otherwise we'd all drown in prejudices. Without that there wouldn't be even a single great man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Be near your brothers. Not just one, but both of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He's an intelligent man, but it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help--exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I have not said all this to justify myself .... But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself. I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I don't want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oh, he understood very well that for the meek soul of a simple Russian, exhausted by grief and hardship and, above all, by constant injustice and sin, his own or the world's, there was no stronger need than to find a holy shrine or a saint to prostrate himself before and to worship.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Christ knew that by bread alone you cannot reanimate man. If there were no spiritual life, no ideal of Beauty, man would pine away, die, go mad, kill himself or give himself to pagan fantasies. And as Christ, the ideal of Beauty in Himself and his Word, he decided it was better to implant the ideal of Beauty in the soul. If it exists in the soul, each would be the brother of everyone else and then, of course, working for each other, all would also be rich. Whereas if you give them bread, they might become enemies to each other out of boredom.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I worship her, Alyosha, worship her. Only she doesn't see it. No, she still thinks I don't love her enough. And she tortures me, tortures me with her love. The past was nothing! In the past it was only that infernal body of hers that tortured me, but now I've taken all her soul into my soul and through her I've become a man. Will they marry us? If they don't I will die of jealousy. I imagine something every day...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men- and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man. For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The need for beauty and the [artistic] creation which embodies it is inseparable from man, and without it man would possibly not want to live in the world.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Beauty will save the world.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A few days earlier, in front of his guests at his own birthday celebration, this man had started smashing his own crockery and tearing his and his wife's clothes, because he was not offered enough vodka; then he went on to break every stick of furniture in his house and smash all the windows, and he did it all for the "beauty" of the gesture, as Mr. Karamazov had just now.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky