Inspirational Quotes 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!”
“I am besieged by such strange thoughts, such dark sensations, such obscure questions, which still crowd my mind - and somehow I have neither the strength nor the desire to resolve them. It is not for me to resolve all this!”
“And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one's habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? He is isolated, and what does he care about the whole? They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.”
“She is lying,” he thought to himself, biting his nails vindictively. “Proud creature! She won’t admit she wants to do it out of charity! Too haughty! Oh, base characters! They even love as though they hate... Oh, how I... hate them all!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime And Punishment
“ألا إن السعداء لا يطاقون ولا يحتملون”
topics: الليالي-البيضاء
“Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.”
“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’.”
“Quanto mais gosto da humanidade em geral, menos aprecio as pessoas em particular, como indivíduos.”
“Quien para otro cava una zanja en ella cae”
“I had the patience to sit like a fool with these people, listening to them for four hours on end, and never daring say a word or knowing what to say. I would fall into a stupor and break out in perspiration again and again. Paralysis hung over me. But it was good and beneficial. When I returned home, I would put away my longing to embrace all of humanity for a while.”
“If the suffering of children goes to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”
“There are people who feel deeply but are somehow beaten down. Their buffoonery is something like a spiteful irony against those to whom they dare not speak the truth directly because of a long-standing, humiliating timidity before them. Believe me, Krasotkin, such buffoonery is sometimes extremely tragic.”
“And is it only a dream, that in the end man will find his joy in deeds of enlightenment and mercy alone, and not in cruel pleasures as now?”
“sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses.”
“Why, like all men," she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement - "You are all evil!”
“No podría expresarme mejor su desprecio que dejándome hablar libremente y sin censura de mi amor.”
“You're Sappho, I'm Phaon, agreed. But there's one thing still troubling me: You don't know your way to the sea.”
“If there is no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and therefore everything is permitted.”
“I think … if there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”
topics: love
“Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't that true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they”
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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.