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Fyodor Dostoyevsky

" Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that's the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will e a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn't care whether he lives or doesn't live, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.''So, that other God does exist, in your opinion?''He doesn't exist, but he does exist. In the stone there' no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Death , classics

related quotes

" Never for one minute have I taken you for reality . . . You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

psychology

" Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

psychology

" A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying ‚Äî to others and to yourself. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Delusion , Honesty

" Though these young men unhappily fail tounderstand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest ofall sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years oftheir seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiplytenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have setbefore them as their goal--such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strengthof many of them. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Strength

" Strength, strength is what I need; nothing can be done without strength; and strength must be gained by strength. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Strength

" You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Desire , Life

" If God does not exist, everything is permitted. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Existence , Belief

" We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Literature , Inspirational

" Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man‚Äôs done and you want him to be a hero at the same time! "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Literature

" Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people‚Äôs hearts and instructs them,‚Ä¶ Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document‚Ä¶ "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Literature

" We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Hope , Literature , Salvation

" There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence. "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Art

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