Fyodor M. Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky:

(11 November [O.S. 30 October] 1821 – St Petersburg, 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881).
Russian novelist and publicist. He is one of the best-known authors in Russian literature. He is counted among the so-called ‘Realist School’ in Russia, although his work is distinguished from many other realists by its philosophical content and dominant dialogue form. Dostoevsky left behind an extensive body of work.

The darker the night, the brithter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the proces of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.

I gave up caring about anything and all the problems disappeared.

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise!

Man only likes to count his troubles: he doesn’t calculate his happiness.

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

I don‘t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.

I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other.

Your worst sin is that you destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

Even if I overcome everything that pains me… I am no longer who I used to be.

Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate … the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.

Only what we want to forget remains in memory.

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.

So many tender and painful, sweet and bitter, emotions crowd into my soul… You cannot dream how bitter it is for me when people don’t understand me, when they mistake what I say, and see it in the wrong light.

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love.

From the outside, you seem mature, with a philosopher’s mind, but inside, you are just a child lost in sweet delusion.

Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.