Dostoyevsky Fyodor

“..un hombre inteligente no puede seriamente cambiarse en otra cosa; sólo un imbécil puede hacerlo. Sí, un hombre inteligente en el Siglo XIX ha de ser ante todo una criatura sin carácter, más aún, está obligado a serlo; un hombre de carácter, un hombre activo, es una criatura preeminentemente limitada¨.”

“Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.”

“I know that, like many other writers, I have many faults, for I am the first to be dissatisfied with myself . . . At the moment when I am trying to review my life's work, I often realize with pain that I have literally failed to express one-twentieth part of what I had wanted to, and perhaps could have expressed. The thing that comforts me is the constant hope that one day God will grant me so much inspiration . . . that I shall be able to express myself more fully, that, in short, I shall express all that is locked in my heart and in my imagination . . . I cannot help feeling that there is much more hidden in me than I have hitherto been able to express as a writer. And yet, speaking without false modesty, there is a great deal that is true and that came from my heart in what I have expressed already.”

“Dacă ar şti că sunt fericiţi, ar fi fericiţi.”

“It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!”

“...There,in his foul, stinking cellar, our offended, down-trodden and ridiculed mouse immerses himself in cold, venomous and, cheifly, everlasting spite. For forty years on end he will remember the offence, down to the smallest and most shameful detail, constantly adding more shameful details of his own, maliciously teasing and irritating himself with his own fantasies. He himself will be ashamed of his fantasies, but nevertheless he will remember all of them, weighing them up and inventing all sorts of things that never happend to him, on the pretext that they too could have happend and he'll forgive nothing. Probably he'll start taking his revenge, but somehow in fits and starts, pettily, anonymously, from behind the stove, believing neither in his right to take revenge, nor in the success of his revenge and knowing beforehand that he will suffer one hundred times more from every single one of his attempts at revenge than the object of his revenge, who, most likely, wont't give a damn.”

“I have in my own life merely carried to the extreme that which you have never ventured to carry even halfway ; and what's more, you've regarded your cowardice as prudence, and found comfortin deceiving yourselves. So that, in fact, I may be even more "alive" than you are. Do take a closer look!”

“A novel requires a hero, and here there's a deliberate collection of all the traits for an anti-hero”

“After all, man may be fond not only ofwell-being. Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as much in his interest as well-being?”

“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”

“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the PRIVACY of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”