Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Aren't we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other?”
“I ought to think it over and make up my mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a moment.”
“the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact—that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning”
“That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled.”
“I'm going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my efforts will make no show,”
“I shall always feel a certain barrier between the Holy of Holies of my inmost soul, and the souls of others, even my wife's. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to myself why. But my whole life, every moment of my life, independently of whatever may happen to me, will be, not meaningless as before, but full of the deep meaning which I shall have the power to impress upon it.”
“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life.”
“It goes without saying that he never spoke with any of his comrades about his love, did not let it slip even during the wildest drinking parties.”
“Why have I been given reason, if I don’t use it so as not to bring unfortunate children into the world?”
“One may save anyone who does not want to be ruined; but if the whole nature is so corrupt, so depraved, that ruin itself seems to be her salvation, what's to be done?”
“En general, los que comprendían «debidamente», según Vrons ky, no comprendían de ningún modo, y procedían como suele pro ceder la gente educada tratándose de las cosas difíciles e insolubles de que está llena la vida: se mantenían en una actitud correcta, evi tando alusiones y preguntas desagradables. Fingían comprender el sentido de la situación, la aceptaban y hasta la aprobaban, conside rando inoportuno y superfluo entrar en explicaciones.”
“In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken. Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.”
“But that’s just the aim of civilization—to make everything a source of enjoyment.” “Well, if that’s its aim, I’d rather be a savage.”
“Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it,” he said, in the word we linking himself with Anna. “No, they must needs teach us how to live. They haven’t an idea of what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness—no life at all,”
“Kitty looked into his face which was so near her own, and long after - for years after - that look so full of love she gave him, and which met with no response from him, cut her to her heart with tormenting shame.”
“he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself.”
“One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than for him, a man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old, to make the young Princess Shtcherbatskaya an offer of marriage; in all likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy of her.”
“(...) that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.”
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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.