Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“La ce bun să mai numărăm zilele, cînd e de ajuns una singură pentru ca omul să cunoască pe deplin fericirea!”

“God preserve you, my dear boy, from ever asking forgiveness for a fault from a woman you love. From one you love especially, however greatly you may have been in fault. For a woman- devil only knows what to make of a woman! I know something about them, anyway. But try acknowledging you are in fault to a woman. Say, ‘I am sorry, forgive me,’ and a shower of reproaches will follow! Nothing will make her forgive you simply and directly, she’ll humble you to the dust, bring forward things that have never happened, recall everything, forget nothing, add something of her own, and only then forgive you. And even the best, the best of them do it. She’ll scrape up all the scrapings and load them on your head. They are ready to flay you alive, I tell you, every one of them, all these angels without whom we cannot live!”

“He thirsted for that reformation and renewal. The filthy morass, in which he had sunk of his own free will, was too revolting to him, and, like very many men in such cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he could fly away from this accursed place-he would be altogether regenerated, would enter on a new path. That was what he believed in, and what he was yearning for.”

“in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.”

“Here was an unparalleled thing, so that even from such an imperious and contemptuously proud girl as she was, such extremely frank testimony, such sacrifice, such self-immolation was almost impossible to expect. And for what, for whom? To save her betrayer and offender, at least somehow, at least slightly, to contribute to his salvation by creating a good impression in his favor!”

“I think every one should love life above everything in the world.” “Love life more than the meaning of it?” “Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it. I have thought so a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan, you love life, now you've only to try to do the second half and you are saved.”

“Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced , in fact, that everything is disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment - still I should want to live and, having once tried of the cup, I would not turn from it until I have drained it!”

“… ! And would I have been this way, would I have been this way on this night, and at this moment, sitting with you now, would I be talking like this, would I be moving like this, would I look at you and at the world like this, if I really were a parricide, when even the inadvertent killing of Grigory gave me no rest all night—not from fear, oh! not just from fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And you want me to reveal and tell about yet another new meanness of mine, yet another new disgrace, to such scoffers as you, who do not see anything and do not believe anything, blind moles and scoffers, even if it would save me from your accusation?”

“socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”

“Ama, širok je čovjek, čak i preširok, ja bih ga suzio.”

“Connoisseurs of Russian beauty could have foretold with certainty that this fresh, still youthful beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty, would “spread”; that the face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very soon appear upon her forehead and round the eyes; the complexion would grow coarse and red perhaps—in fact, that it was the beauty of the moment, the fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women.”

“And the truth is not in gudgeons, I’ve already declared as much! Father monks, why do you fast? Why do you expect a heavenly reward for that? For such a reward, I’ll go and start fasting, too! No, holy monk, try being virtuous in life, be useful to society without shutting yourself up in a monastery on other people’s bread, and without expecting any reward up there—that’s a little more difficult. I, too, can talk sensibly, Father Superior. What have we got here?” He went up to the table. “Old port wine from Factori’s, Médoc bottled by Eliseyev Brothers!8 A far cry from gudgeons, eh, fathers ? Look at all these bottles the fathers have set out—heh, heh, heh! And who has provided it all? The Russian peasant, the laborer, bringing you the pittance earned by his callused hands, taking it from his family, from the needs of the state! You, holy fathers, are sucking the people’s blood!”

“آدم چه چیزها که نمی‌بیند. وقتی به خشم آمده‌ای دست به دشنه می‌بری یا اگر دشنه نداشتی با دست خالی با حریف گلاویز می‌شوی، مثل یک قوچ، به دیوار شاخ می‌زنی. می‌خواهی خرخره طرف را با دندان بجوی. اما حالا اگر حریف خودش خنجر به دستت بدهد و سینه‌اش را برایت لخت کند، دست از پا خطا نمی‌کنی.”

“But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later--that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies.”

“No you can’t.” “I can.” “You can’t.” “Can!” “Can’t!” An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said: “What’s your name?” “’Tisn’t any of your business, maybe.” “Well I ’low I’ll MAKE it my business.” “Well why don’t you?” “If you say much, I will.” “Much—much—MUCH. There now.”

“for it is precisely the humanity, affability, and brotherly compassion of a doctor which prove the most efficacious remedies for his patients.”

“She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance of the polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking people she did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with religion, seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that they insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof she was looking. Nevertheless, she persevered; and when the volume slipped from her hands, she fancied herself seized with the finest Catholic melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive.”

“a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive.”

“But what do you say to this argument (help me with it): ghosts are, as it were, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too.”

“I must tell vou, Gavril Ardalionovitch,” Mvshkin said suddenly, “that I was once so ill that I really was almost an idiot; but I’ve got over that long ago, and so I rather dislike it when people call me an idiot to my face. Though I can excuse it in you in consideration of your ill-luck, but in your vexation you’ve been abusive to me twice already. I don’t like that at all, especially so suddenly at first acquaintance; and so, as we are just at the crossroads, hadn’t we better part? You go to the right to your home, and I go to the left. I’ve got twenty-five roubles, and I shall be sure to find some lodging-house.”