Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Look at them running to and fro about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at heart and, worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they’d be wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!”

“In such cases, 'we overcome our moral feeling if necessary', freedom, peace, conscience even, all, all are brought into the market.”

“¿Y en qué piensas ahora? - Pues en que te vas a levantar y vas a pasar junto a mí, y yo voy a mirarte y a seguirte con los ojos; va a crujir la seda de tu vestido, mi corazón va a desfallecer, saldrás de la habitación y yo me acordaré de cada una de las palabras que has pronunciado y del tono de voz con que las has dicho. Y en cuanto a la noche pasada, no pensé en nada, no hice más que escuchar cómo respirabas dormida y cómo te moviste en la cama dos veces...”

“Kako možete znati što će značiti taj dodir jedne osobe s drugom u sudbini dodirnute osobe? Jer, tu je cijeli život i nebrojeno mnoštvo njegovih ogranaka skrivenih od naših pogleda.”

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”

“We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.”

“To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.”

“Some people have luck, and everything comes out right with them; others have none, and never a thing turns out fortunately.”

“Kendini bilen, akıllı-uslu bir adam, kendine karşı son derece titiz değilse ve kendisini nefret edercesine küçümsemiyorsa gururlu da değildir.”

“İnsanoğlu amacına ilerlemeyi sever, fakat amacını elde etmeyi değil.”

“Sakın insanoğlu hedefe ulaşmaktan, kurmakta olduğu yapıyı bitirmekten içgüdüsel bir ürküntü duyduğu için yıkmayı, bozup dağıtmayı seviyor olmasın?”

“İnsanın bütün işi gücü, sanırım vida değil insan olduğunu her an kendi kendisine kanıtlamaktır.”

“Ellerinden geldiğince erdemli, ağırbaşlı davranmayı kendilerine amaç edinen, sanki dünyada erdemli, ağırbaşlı yaşanabileceğini göstermek istercesine çevrelerine ışık saçan bir takım erdemli, ağırbaşlı kişiler -insanseverler, bilgeler- vardır. 'E, sonra?' diyeceksiniz. Sonrası belli: Bu gösteriş düşkünlerinin çoğu, eninde sonunda sapıtarak akla gelmedik herzeler yerler.”

“Mantık, kuşkusuz iyi şeydir, ama olup olacağı bir mantıktır ve insanın düşünme gereksinmesini gidermekten öteye geçemez; oysa istek yaşamın ta kendisidir, hem de en basit davranıştan yüce mantığa kadar. Gerçi isteğin eline kalmış bir yaşam çoğu zaman deli zırvasından başka bir şey değildir, ama unutmayalım, gene de yaşamdır, kare kökü almak değil.”

“İnsanoğlu -her zaman, her yerde, kim olursa olsun- mantığının ve çıkarlarının buyurduğu gibi değil de, gönlünün çektiği gibi davranmıştır; çıkarlarımızda çatışan şeyler de istenebilir, hatta bazen bütünüyle böyle olmalıdır.”

“Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.”

“One's very own free, unfettered desire, one's own whim, no matter how wild, one's own fantasy, even though sometimes roused to the point of madness-all this constitutes precisely that previously omitted, most advantageous advantage which isn't included under any classification and because of which all systems and theories are constantly smashed to smithereens.”

“Uit 100 konijnen bouw je nooit een paard, uit 100 vermoedes bouw je nooit een bewijs!”

“Waarom ben ik zo dom om als alle anderen dom zijn en als ik zeker weet dat ze dom zijn, daat ik dan zelf niet verstandig wil zijn?”

“and so, if you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, or seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you'll get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man. You must, however, note all the shades of his laugh.”

“You're Sappho, I'm Phaon, agreed.But there's one thing still troubling me:You don't know your way to the sea.”

“I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.”

“Is it true that you insisted you knew no difference in beauty between some brutal sensual stunt and any great deed, even the sacrifice of life for mankind? Is it true that you found a coincidence in beauty, a sameness of pleasure at both poles?...You married out of a passion for torture, out of a passion for remorse, out of moral sensuality.”

“I ask, I demand to be respected! Shatov went on shouting. "Not for my person--to hell with it--but for something else, just for now, for a few words...We are two beings, and we have come together in infinity...for the last time in the world. Abandon your tone and take a human one! At least for once in your life speak in a human voice. Not for my sake, but for your own. Do you understand that you should forgive me that slap in the face if only because with it I gave you an opportunity to know your infinite power...Again you smile that squeamish, worldly smile. Oh, when will you understand me! Away with the young squire!”

“Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy; only because of that. It's everything, everything, Whoever learns will at once immediately become happy, that same moment..."And when did you find out that you were so happy?""Last week, on Tuesday, no, Wednesday, because it was Wednesday by then, in the night.""And what was the occasion?""I don't remember, just so; I was pacing the room...it makes no difference. I stopped my clock, it was two thirty-seven.""As an emblem that time should stop?"Kirillov did not reply."They're not good," he suddenly began again, "because they don't know they're good. When they find out, they won't violate the girl. They must find out that they're good, then they'll all become good at once, all, to a man."Well, you did find out, so you must be good?""I am good.""With that I agree, incidentally," Stavrogin muttered frowningly."He who teaches that all are good, will end the world.""He who taught it was crucified.""He will come, and his name is the man-god.""The God-man?""The man-god--that's the whole difference.""Can it be you who lights the icon lamp?""Yes, I lit it.""You've become a believer?""The old woman likes the icon lamp...she's busy today," Kirillov muttered. "But you don't pray yet?""I pray to everything. See, there's a spider crawling on the wall, I look and am thankful to it for crawling."His eyes lit up again. He kept looking straight at Stavrogin, his gaze firm and unflinching. Stavrogin watched him frowningly and squeamishly, but there was no mockery in his eyes."I bet when I come the next time you'll already believe in God," he said, getting up and grabbing his hat."Why?" Kirillov also rose."If you found out that you believe in God, you would believe; but since you don't know yet that you believe in God, you don't believe," Nikolai Vsevolodovich grinned.”

“But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it's for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!”

“My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.”

“It seems to me that if there were such a man, for example, as would seize a red-hot bar of iron and clutch it in his hand, with the purpose of measuring his strength of mind, and in the course of ten seconds would be overcoming the intolerable pain and would finally overcome it, this man, it seems to me, would endure something like what was experience now, in these ten seconds, by Nikolai Vsevolodovich.”

“He would shoot his adversary in a duel, and go against a bear if need be, and fight off a robber in the forest--all as successfully and fearlessly as L---n, yet without any sense of enjoyment, but solely out of unpleasant necessity, listlessly, lazily, even with boredom. Anger, of course, constituted a progress over L---n, even over Lermontov. There was perhaps more anger in Nikolai Vsevolodovich than in those two together, but this anger was cold, calm, and if one may put it so, reasonable, and therefore the most repulsive and terrible that can be.”

“There is no doubt that these legendary gentlemen were capable of experiencing, even to an intense degree, the sensation of fear--otherwise they would have been much calmer, and would ot have made the sense of danger into a necessity of their nature. No, but overcoming their own cowardice--that of course, was what tempted them. A ceaseless reveling in victory and the awareness that no one can be victorious over you--that was what attracted them.”

“And a real, undoubted grief is sometimes capable of making a solid and steadfast man even out of a phenomenally light-minded one, if only for a short time; moreover, real and true grief has sometimes even made fools more intelligent, also only for a time, of course; grief has this property.”

“it may happen that he sends a letter in verse, a mag-ni-fi-cent one, but which afterward he might wish to bring back with the tears of his whole life, for the sense of beauty is violated.”

“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”

“I don't know how it is with others, and my feeling is that I cannot be like any other. Any other thinks, and then at once thinks something else. I cannot think something else, I think one thing all my life. God has tormented me all my life.”

“Each man cannot judge except by himself," he said, blushing. "There will be entire freedom when it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live. That is the goal to everything.""The goal? But then perhaps no one will even want to live?""No one," he said resolutely."Man is afraid of death because he loves life, that's how I understand it," I observed, "and that is what nature tells us.""That is base, that is the whole deceit!" his eyes began to flash. "Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That's how they've made it. Life now is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that is the whole deceit. Man now is not yet the right man. There will be a new man, happy and proud. He for whom it will make no difference whether he lives or does not live, he will be the new man. He who overcomes pain and fear will himself be God. And this God will not be.”

“One life passed, another began, then that passed and a third began, and there's still no end. All the ends are cut off as if with a pair of scissors.”

“And why am I lying down? You must stand 'as an example and a reproach,' she says. Mais, entre nous soit dit, what else can a man destined to be a standing 'reproach' do but lie down--doesn't she see that?”

“Stepan Trofimovich managed to touch the deepest strings in his friend's heart and to call forth in him the first, still uncertain sensation of that age-old, sacred anguish which the chosen soul, having once tasted and known it, will never exchange for any cheap satisfaction. (There are lovers of this anguish who cherish it more than the most radical satisfaction, if that were even possible.)”

“In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.”

“Clearly, he now had not to be anguished, not to suffer passively, by mere reasoning about unresolvable questions, but to do something without fail, at once, quickly.”

“Till the last moment they dress a man up in peacock's feathers, till the last moment they hope for the good and not the bad; and though they may have premonitions of the other side of the coin, for the life of them they will not utter a real word beforehand; the thought alone makes them cringe; they wave the truth away with both hands, till the very moment when the man they've decked out so finely sticks their noses in it with his own two hands.”

“He will pity us who pitied everyone ... And He will say, 'I receive them, my wise and reasonable ones, forasmuch as not one of them considered himself worthy of this thing ...”

“Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.”

“Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end up by eating one another, that's what I prophesy.”

“Although Pulcheria Alexandrovna was forty-three, her face still retained traces of her former beauty; she looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age. We may add in parenthesis that to preserve all this is the only means of retaining beauty to old age.”

“In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help--exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I have not said all this to justify myself .... But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself. I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I don't want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not.”

“For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.”

“You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love.”

“How good life is when one does something good and just!”

“It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who “every one” was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was...”