Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like Indian plants, need a special soil,”

“It is dreadful that one cannot tear our the past by the roots. We cannot tear it out but we can hide the memory of it.”

“When you've grasped the fact that today or tomorrow you will die and nothing will be left of you, everything becomes so insignificant.”

“Desiderava al tempo stesso morire e vivere a Parigi.”

“Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?”

“And the most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all my fault, though I’m not to blame.”

“for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now that it has failed.... (Everything seems stupid when it fails.)”

“La verdad y la creencia en la verdad de una cosa son dos mundos de intereses completamente extraños el uno al otro, son casi dos mundos opuestos, se va del uno al otro por caminos profundamente diversos.”

“Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky’s greatest friend in the regiment.”

“Spring was a long time unfolding. During the last weeks of Lent the weather was clear and frosty. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night it went down to seven below; there was such a crust that carts could go over it where there was no road. There was still snow at Easter. Then suddenly, on Easter Monday, a warm wind began to blow, dark clouds gathered, and for three days and nights warm, heavy rain poured down. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature. Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feet, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants’ axes, repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come.”

“Hayatının bütün izleri sanki ona sarılmış şöyle diyordu: "Hayır, bizi bırakıp gitmeyeceksin, başka birisi olmayacaksın, nasılsan öyle kalacaksın: Kuşkularınla, kendinden sonsuz hoşnutsuzluğunla, sonuçsuz kalan kendini düzeltme deneyimlerinle, yaşadığın düşüşlerle ve senin için olanaksız, sana nasip olmayacak sonsuz bir mutluluk beklentisiyle.”

“The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met everyday, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexey Alexandrovitch made it a rule to see his wife everyday, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it”

“...those children were already beginning to repay her care by affording her small joys. These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.”

“I am crushed, I am annihilated, I am no longer a man!”

“You take Seryozha to hurt me,” she said, looking at him from under her brows. “You do not love him. . . . Leave me Seryozha!” “Yes, I have lost even my affection for my son, because he is associated with the repulsion I feel for you. But still I shall take him. Goodbye!”

“Even Karenin, who might well have turned out to be a flat caricature with his stick-out ears and cracking knuckles, is endowed with a complex personality as the other characters see him differently on different occasions: when Anna sees him at the Petersburg station, when he is at his government desk, when his son recoils from his embrace, when he is at the interview with his divorce lawyer, when”

“Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.”

“Without knowing what I am, and why I am here, it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that, and therefore I can't live,' he said to himself.”

“At the fact that I’m unable to think up a situation in which life would not be suffering, that we’re all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you do?”

“The smoke from the gun was white as milk over the green of the grass.”