Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“for him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class—all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class—she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity.”
“and at once, amidst all the skaters, he knew her. He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized his heart.”
“Accustomed to the tranquil side of nature, she sought the dramatic in its stead. She loved the sea only for its storms, and the green grass only when it grew in patches among ruins.”
“E allora sarabande senza fine si srotolavano nella sua mente: come una baiadera ondeggiava di sogno in sogno , di malinconia in malinconia”
topics: madame-bovary
“Maar zij werd verteerd door verlangen, door woede en wrok.”
“Там было все про любовь, там были одни только любовники, любовницы, преследуемые дамы, падающие без чувств в уединенных беседках, кучера, которых убивают на каждой станции, кони, которых загоняют на каждой странице, дремучие леса, сердечные тревоги, клятвы, рыдания, слезы и поцелуи, челны, озаренные лунным светом, соловьиное пение в рощах, герои, храбрые, как львы, кроткие, как агнцы, добродетельные донельзя, всегда безукоризненно одетые, слезоточивые, как урны.”
“Only half a word that is to the point can kindle laughter under such circumstances, and especially when it is dangerous to laugh.”
“He had not even thought of saying this, but it was suddenly said of itself.”
“Not long ago I read the criticism made by a German who had lived in Russia, on our students and schoolboys of to-day. 'Show a Russian schoolboy,' he writes, 'a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about, and he will give you back the map next day with corrections on it.' No knowledge and unbounded conceit- that's what the German meant to say about the Russian schoolboy.”
“It begins to seem natural to him that the pleasures attainable through his capricious fantasy are fuller, richer and dearer than life itself. Finally, in his delusion he completely loses that moral sense through which man is capable of appreciating all the beauty of reality. He goes astray, loses himself, lets slip those moments of real happiness; and, in a state of apathy, he folds his arms and does not wish to know that man’s life consists in constant contemplation of oneself in nature and in day-to-day reality.”
“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 unrecognised 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.”
“But scales hung before me and obscured my mind. Fateful, terrible scales! How did it come about that all this fell from my eyes, that all of a sudden I saw the light and understood everything?”
“People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”
“It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me. What if He doesn't exist? What if Rakitin's right- that it's an idea made up by men? Then if He doesn't exist, man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only”
“In the sphere of actual life, which has, indeed, its own rights, but also lays upon us great duties and obligations, in that sphere, if we want to be humane- Christian, in fact- we must, or ought to, act only upon convictions justified by reason and experience, which have been passed through the crucible of analysis; in a word, we must act rationally, and not as though in dream and delirium, that we may not do harm, that we may not ill-treat and ruin a man. Then it will be real Christian work, not only mystic, but rational and philanthropic....”
“I am sorry, friends and brothers, that I cannot express this clearly. But woe to those who have slain themselves on earth, woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. They tell us that it is a sin to pray for them and outwardly the Church, as it were, renounces them, but in my secret heart I believe that we may pray even for them.”
“This soldier had been taken prisoner in some remote part of Asia, and was threatened with an immediate agonising death if he did not renounce Christianity and follow Islam.”
“İsteyerek soytarılık yapanlar, hiç de acınacak insanlar değillerdir.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Polzunkov
“Dacă Semion Ivanovici nu izbutea să convieţuiască în bună înţelegere cu lumea – aceasta se datora numai şi numai lui. Lucrul de căpetenie, care atrăsese atenţia tuturor, fusese, fără îndoială, zgârcenia, cărpănoşia lui Semion Ivanovici. Această trăsătură de caracter fusese numaidecât prinsă de toţi şi luată în considerare, fiindcă Semion Ivanovici – pentru nimic în lume – nu împrumuta nimănui, în nici un chip, ceainicul: chiar pentru un timp cât de scurt. Era cu atât mai nedrept în această privinţă, cu cât el însuşi nu bea ceai aproape deloc.”
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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.