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For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Humanity can live without science, it can live without bread, but it cannot live without beauty. Without beauty, there would be nothing left to do in this life. Here the secret lies. Here lies the entire story. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
In the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Money is coined liberty. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I've always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I've been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I've looked away and never could look people straight in the eye. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. And it was after that that I found out the truth . I learnt the truth last November on the third of November, to be precise and I remember every instant since. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point ... and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness, ... then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift ... every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself? -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
And it is so simple ... The one thing is - love thy neighbor as thyself - that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Who doesn't desire his fathers death? -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Taking a new step ... is what people fear most. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Humiliate the reason and distort the soul. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right! -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery and authority. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Yes, that's right ... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Above all, do not lie to yourself. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don't succeed, I quit! -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings of what? Of the truth , for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes , have seen it in all its glory . -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To cook your hare you must first catch it. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery ... The great thing about it is equality ... Slaves are bound to be equal. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall ... -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wealth is the number of things one can do without. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus ... -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Trifles, trifles are what matter! -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If there is no God, everything is permitted. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
A single day is sufficient for a man to discover what happiness is. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
What is hell? ... The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The sky was horribly dark , but one could distinctly see tattered clouds , and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star , and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea : I decided to kill myself that night . -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
From a hundred rabbits you can't make a horse. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If God does not exist, then everything is permissible. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared? -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it in my mind. I have seen it, SEEN IT and the living image of it has filled my soul forever ... -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Chance may do anything. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them - the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom - God man or man God. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Gambling is a most foolish and imprudent pursuit. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If there is no God, then I am God. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If not reason, then the devil. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
When ... in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests? -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I am crazy about mysterious things. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Life is what matters, life alone - the continuous, eternal process of discovering life - and not the discovery itself. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The consciousness of life is higher than life. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I do not wish you much happiness
it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people's philosophy, I will simply repeat: 'Live more' and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Above all, don't lie to yourself. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Only through suffering can we find ourselves. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
You simply can't imagine what men will say! -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To love someone means to see him as God intended him. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
He who masters the grey everyday is a hero. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
It's in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you can put the question, 'Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?' then you are responsible. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
You are a man still young, so to say, in your first youth and so put intellect above everything ... -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If there were no God, he would have to be invented. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
There is not a thing that is more positive than bread. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Life is in ourselves and not in the external. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every man needs a place to go to. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Let us first fulfill Christ's injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To love another person is to see them as God intended them to be. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The degree of a nation's civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If God is dead, everything is allowed. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
One could never judge a man without seeing him close, for oneself ... -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
They were like two enemies in love with one another. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
What you need more than anything in life is a definite position. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Beauty would save the world. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I have a plan-to go mad. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything! -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Of course I shall go astray often ... for who does not make mistakes? But I cannot go far wrong for I have seen the truth. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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
If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Is it really not possible to touch the gaming table without being instantly infected by superstition? -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
If the person laughs well, they are a good person. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid! -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering - that is a fact. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Make us your slaves, but feed us. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky