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Quotes of Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, sometimes transliterated Dostoyevsky, Dostoievsky, or Dostoevski listen (November 11 [O.S. October 30] 1821 – February 9 [O.S. January 28] 1881) is considered one of two greatest prose writers of Russian literature, alongside close contemporary Leo Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century thought and world literature. Dostoevsky's primary works, mainly novels, explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of his 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was named by Walter Kaufmann as the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
- Realists do not fear the results of their study.
- Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
- 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.
- Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.
- Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
- Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.
- If there is no God, everything is permitted.
- If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.
- Innovators and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.
- It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?
- It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
- Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
- Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.
- Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
- Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.
- Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
- 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.
- Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
- The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
- The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.
- The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
- The soul is healed by being with children.
- There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
- There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
- To live without Hope is to Cease to live.
- To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
- We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.