Super Quotes #54 : Fyodor Dostoyevsky


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A developed and decent man cannot be vain without a boundless exactingness towards himself and without despising himself at moments to the point of hatred.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky


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Found below in my comments to this post are more quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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They suffer, of course... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it?

Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman's money which will be buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hospitals—and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all.

What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day she bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite; it almost had to be amputated.

The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it.

I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful hatred-that hate which is only a hair's-breath from love, from the maddest love!

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.

ولا أزال ألقي على نفسي سؤالا هو في هذه المرة سؤال جنون مطبق: ها هم أولاء جميعا يركضون ويسرعون

فمن يدري؟ ألا يمكن ألا يكون هذا كله إلا حلما. ألا يمكن ألا يكون ها هنا إنسان واحد حقيقي، وفعل واحد واقعي،