Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Can’t you go tomorrow?’ she said. ‘No, I can’t! The business I’m going for, the warrant and the money, won’t have come by tomorrow,’ he replied.”

“I am writing a novel,’ Tolstoy informed his friend the critic Nikolai Strakhov on 11 May 1873, referring to the book that was to become Anna Karenina. ‘I’ve been at it for more than a month now and the main lines are traced out. This novel is truly a novel, the first in my life …”

“Toda la diversidad, la hermosura, el encanto de la vida, se componen de luces y sombras.”

“Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attai its highest mainfestation only in conjunction with all kinds of art.”

“He was very well aware that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand about it, and can never be ridiculous; and so it was with a proud and gay smile under his mustaches that he lowered the opera glass and looked at his cousin. "But”

“In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.”

“With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,”

“And no one, no one should know what passes between husband and wife if they love one another. And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens.”

“Todas las hormigas respetables comenzaron con el hormiguero y probablemente terminarán con él, lo que las honra por su aplicación y su perseverancia. Pero el hombre es una criatura frívola e imprevisible y quizá, a la manera de un jugador de ajedrez, gusta sólo del proceso de llegar a la meta, y no de la meta misma. ¿Y quién sabe? (nadie puede saberlo de cierto), quizá la única meta que en este mundo persigue el hombre consista únicamente en ese ir hacia ella, o, dicho de otro modo, consista en la vida misma, y no realmente en la meta, la que, por supuesto, será algo así como "dos y dos son cuatro", o sea, una fórmula; pero "dos y dos son cuatro" no es vida, señores, sino el comienzo de la muerte”

“Forgive me not according to my unworthiness, but according to thy loving kindness.”

“Ticăloşii iubesc oamenii cinstiţi.”

“Well, I know. It's jam—that's what it is. Forty times I've said if you didn't let that jam alone I'd skin you. Hand me that switch.”

“I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to acknowledge to myself that I was not loved;”

“Had you accepted that third counsel of the mighty spirit, you would have furnished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill - for the need for universal union is the third and last torment of men.”

“Whether he was acting ill or well he did not know, and far from laying down the law about it, he now avoided talking or thinking about it. Thinking about it led him into doubts and prevented him from seeing what he should and should not do. But when he did not think, but just lived, he unceasingly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge deciding which of two actions was the better and which the worse; and as soon as he did what he should not have done he immediately felt this. In this way he lived, not knowing or seeing any possibility of knowing what he was or why he lived in the world.”

“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”

“He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.”

“Un homme, au contraire, ne devait-il pas tout connaître, exceller en des activités multiples, vous initier aux énergies de la passion, aus raffinements de la vie, à tous les mystères?”

“Speak to her now? But that's just why I'm afraid to speak—because I'm happy now, happy in hope, anyway… . And then?… . But I must! I must! I must! Away with weakness!”

“When she went upstairs to dress, and looked into the looking glass, she noticed with joy that it was one of her good days, and that she was in complete possession of all her forces,—she needed this so for what lay before her: she was conscious of external composure and free grace in her movements.”