Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all? Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself?”

“Because what is man without his volition but a stop on a barrel-organ cylinder?”

“To begin with, at home I spent most of my time reading. I wanted to stifle all that was continuously boiling up inside me through external impressions. Out of all external impressions, reading was the only one possible for me. Of course, reading helped a lot - it excited, delighted and tormented me. But at times it bored me to death. For all that I still wanted to be doing things and I would suddenly plunge into dark, subterranean, vile, not so much depravity as petty dissipation. My mean, trivial, lusts were keen and fiery as a result of my constant, morbid irritability. The surges were hysterical, always accompanied by tears and convulsion. Apart from reading I had nowhere to turn - I mean, there was nothing in my surroundings that I could respect then or to which I might have been attracted. Moreover, dreadful ennui was seething within me, a hysterical craving for contradictions and contrasts would make its presence felt [...].”

“…but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.”

“Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!... Stay, let me take breath...”

“Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them.”

“It often only seems that there are no points in common, when there really are a lot ... it comes from people's laziness, that they sort themselves out by looks and can't find anything”

“يجب ان تعامل اكثر الناس .. معاملتك اطفالا ، وان تعامل بعض الناس .. معاملتك مرضى ”

“Las desgracias ajenas no nos instruyen.”

“Satan .”

“Those innocent eyes cut my soul like a razor...however, in a depraved man this, too, might be only a sensual attraction.”

“You should not have gone murdering people with a hatchet. That is no occupation for a gentleman.”

“ألا إن السعداء لا يطاقون ولا يحتملون”

“برنامه ای دارم،برنامه دیوانه شدن”

“while I don’t agree or care for what you are saying, I do support your right to say it, for herein lies true freedom’.”

“Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.”

“She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life—the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.”

“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!”

“You're Sappho, I'm Phaon, agreed. But there's one thing still troubling me: You don't know your way to the sea.”

“انسان در شادی و خرسندی به چه زیبائیهایی می رسد ! چگونه دلِ آدمی مالامال از عشق می شود! احساس می کنی که می خواهی تمامی ِ عشقت را به قلب ِ دیگری سرازیر کنی، می خواهی خر چخ در اطراف ِ توست انعکاس شادی و خنده باشد . و شادی ، چه مُسری است”