“It's like this,' began the elder. 'All these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons, and formerly with flogging, too, do not reform anyone and, what's more, scarcely deter even one criminal, and, far from diminishing, the number of crimes… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share Image
“Beauty is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing. There God and the Devil strive for mastery, and the battleground… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share Image
“Listen! I know it's not right to talk. Better to set an example, better to just start - I have already started - and - and can one really be unhappy? Oh, what do my grief and my misfortune matter if I have the strength to be happy? You know, I don't understand how one can walk by a tree… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share
“When all are undressed, one is somehow not ashamed, but when one's the only one undressed and everybody is looking, it's degrading,' he kept repeating to himself, again and again. 'It's like a dream, I've sometimes dreamed of being in such degrading positions.' It was a misery to him to take off his socks. They were very dirty, and so… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share
“And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share Image
“I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share
“He is a man of intelligence, but to act sensibly, intelligence is not enough.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share Image
“if [God] doesn't exist, man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share Image
“From an encounter in 1862... “Dickens told me,” Dostoyevsky recalled in a letter written years later, “that all the good, simple people in his novels . . . are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share
“It must be the top drawer," he reflected. "So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring… . And there's one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can't be the key of the chest of drawers … then there must be some… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share
“- You take evil for good. It's a passing crisis. It's the result of your illness, perhaps. - You do despise me! It's simply that I don't want to do good, I want to do evil, and it has nothing to do with illness. - Why do evil? - So that everything will be destroyed. Oh, how nice it would… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share
“Clouds overlaid the sky as with a shroud of mist, and everything looked sad, rainy, and threatening under a fine drizzle which was beating against the window-panes, and streaking their dull, dark surfaces with runlets of cold, dirty moisture. Only a scanty modicum of daylight entered to war with the trembling rays of the ikon lamp. The dying man threw… — Fyodor Dostoyevsky Copy Share
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