Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“what good is faith by force? Besides, proofs are no help to faith, especially material proofs. Thomas believed not because he saw the risen Christ but because he wanted to believe even before that.2 Spiritualists, for example … I like them so much … imagine, they think they’re serving faith because devils show their little horns to them from the other world. ‘This,’ they say, ‘is a material proof, so to speak, that the other world exists.’ The other world and material proofs, la-di-da! And, after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also a proof of God? I want to join an idealist society and form an opposition within it: ‘I’m a realist,’ I’ll say, ‘not a materialist,’ heh, heh!”
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.