Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Where was it I read how a man sentenced to death, an hour before he was due to die, said or thought that if he were obliged to live somewhere very high up, on a cliff, on a ledge with room for a pair of feet and nothing more, while all around him were chasms, the ocean, eternal gloom, eternal solitude and eternal tempest, and he had to stay like that, standing on one square yard, for the rest of his life, for a thousand years, for eternity – then he’d rather live like that than die there and then? To live, to live, to live! No matter how – just live!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
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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.