Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“But you are a great sinner, that's true," he added almost solemnly, and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from White Nights
“نعم اننا نستطيع عند اللزوم أن نخنق حتى احساسنا الأخلاقي! إننا نستطيع عند اللزوم أن نحمل إلى السوق كل شيء فنبيعه فيها: الحرية، الطمأنينة حتى راحة الضمير ! فلتتحطم حياتنا إذا كان في ذلك سعادة لأولئك الذين نحبهم! وأكثر من ذلك أننا نلفق لأنفسنا عندئذ سفسطة خاصة فنريح ضمائرنا إلى حين، مسوغين أعمالنا قائلين لأنفسنا: إن ما فعلنا هو ما كان ينبغي لنا أن نفعله مادمنا نعمل في سبيل هدف نبيل وغاية شريفة !”
“وحين يهيلون على قبري التراب ، انثر فوقه فتات الخبز ، فتتهافت عليه العصافير ، فأسمع صوتها ، ولا اشعر أني وحيد”
“But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost. ”
“But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone.”
“Because lascivious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he now had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them from Emma; they should be taken with a grain of salt, he thought, because the most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings - as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions, or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.”
“For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.”
“You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness. Work, work unceasingly. Remember my words, for although I shall talk with you again, not only my days but my hours are numbered.”
“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner. and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“and what shall I have to dream of when I have been so happy in reality beside you!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from White Nights
“I hated my face, for example, found it odious, and even suspected that there was some mean expression in it, and therefore every time I came to work I made a painful effort to carry myself as independently as possible, and to express as much nobility as possible with my face. "let it not be a beautiful face," I thought, "but, to make up for that, let it be a noble, an expressive, and, above all, an extremely intelligent one." Yet I knew, with certainty and suffering, that i would never be able to express all those perfections with the face I had. The most terrible thing was that I found it positively stupid. And I would have been quite satisfied with intelligence. Let's even say I would even have agreed to a mean expression, provided only that at the same time my face be found terribly intelligent.”
“originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.”
“It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.”
“With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.”
“Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene”
topics: humor
“I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!”
“Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today -- gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon.”
“غير أن هناك أناساً يتألمون ألماً متفجراً ينطلق انتحابات على حين فجأة، ثم إذا هو يعتصم بعد ذلك بالترتيل. وهذه الحالة تلاحظ على النساء خاصة، وليس هذا الألم أقل أو أخف من ألم الصامتين. إن الترتيل لا يخفف عن النفس إلا لأنه يحيي جروح القلب وينكؤها أعمق فأعمق. إن هذه الصورة من صور الألم لا تتطلب عزاء ولا تسعى إلى سلوى، لأنها تغتذي من الشعور باستحالة اشباعه، فالترتيل إنما يعبر عن الحاجة إلى نكء الجروح بغير توقف.”
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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.