“ The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 1.1K
“ The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 3.1K
“ Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 273
“ Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
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“ In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 3.4K
“ I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 1.1K
“ 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. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 1.3K
“ The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 3.7K
“ What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 1.7K
“ Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 1.6K
“ What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 2.9K
“ Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 3.1K
“ Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be allembracing and universal. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 3.7K
“ Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 1.7K
“ Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun... One feels that this inexhaustible fancy is weary at last and worn out with continual exercise, because one is growing into manhood, outgrowing one's old ideals: they are being shattered into fragments, into dust; if there is no other life one must build one up from the fragments. And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him! ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
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“ And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . . ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 3.3K
“ In the end, you feel that your muchvaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you're bound to grow out of your old ideals; they're smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from the splinters and dust. But the heart longs for something different! And it is vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart and bring back to life everything that can send the blood rushing wildly through the body, fill the eyes with tearseverything that can delude you so well! ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 138
“ Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being. ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
- 3.5K
“ I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then let it get even worse! ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
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“ And so these refined parents rejected their fiveyearold girl to all kinds of torture. They beat her, kicked her, flogged her, for no reason that they themselves knew of. The child’s whole body was covered in bruises. Eventually they devised a new refinement. Under the pretext that the child dirtied her bed (as though a fiveyearold deep in her angelic sleep could be punished for that), they forced her to eat excrement, smearing it all over her face. And it was the mother that did it! And that woman would lock her daughter up in the outhouse until morning and she did so even on the coldest nights, when it was freezing. Just imagine the woman being able to sleep with the child’s cries coming from that outhouse! Imagine that little creature, unable to even understand what is happening to her, beating her sore little chest with her tiny fist, weeping hot, unresentful, meek tears, and begging ‘gentle Jesus’ to help her… ...let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, only to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it? ”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky- Copy
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