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Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes - Page 24

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Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Beautiful, Awful, Sides
Fyodor Dostoevsky (2017). “The Brothers Karamazov (English Russian Edition illustrated): Братья Карамазовы (англо-русская редакция иллюстрированная)”, p.251, Clap Publishing, LLC.

It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Stars, Night, Sky

Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men, Intelligent, Water
"Notes from Underground". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Part 1, Chapter 5, p. 19), 1918.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men, Errors, Perhaps Love

I wanted to pray for an hour, but I keep thinking and thinking, and always sick thoughts, and my head aches - what is the use of praying? - it's only a sin! It is strange, too, that I am not sleepy: in great, too great sorrow, after the first outbursts one is always sleepy. Men condemned to death, they say, sleep very soundly on the last night. And so it must be, it si the law of nature, otherwise their strength would not hold out... I lay down on the sofa but I did not sleep...

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sleep, Night, Men

Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fate, Accepting, Renounce
Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012). “Crime and Punishment”, p.45, Vintage

You are a man still young, so to say, in your first youth and so put intellect above everything.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men, Firsts, Youth
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1999). “Crime and Punishment”, p.467, Modern Library

Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance.... Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do.... It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ideas, Giving, Soul

God knows what lives in me in place of me.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
God Knows, Knows
"The Idiot".

What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Daughter, Mother, Creativity

I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you… My precious, my darling, my dearest!

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Reading, Writing, Ideas

I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child's tormentor: 'Just art thou, O Lord!' but I do not want to cry out with them. While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mother, Art, Children

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Party, Judging, Suffering

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Suffering, Atonement, Achieve
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jessie Coulson (2008). “Crime and Punishment”, p.403, Oxford University Press

This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out; that you will never become a different man.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men, Gone, Degradation

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men, Age, Coward

I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Real, Gentleman, Illness
"White Nights and Other Stories".

I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I...I wanted to have the daring...and I killed her.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mad, Flying, Devil
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.412, Google Publishing

I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Hero, Intelligent, Men
"Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Reality, Christ, Should

I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fall, Sadness, Light
"Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Two, Giving, Four

He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mind, Desire, Faces

He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Heart, Feelings, Doe
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2014). “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time”, p.211, Google Publishing

Eh, brother, but nature has to be corrected and guided, otherwise we'd all drown in prejudices. Without that there wouldn't be even a single great man.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Brother, Men, Prejudice

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