Quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being… can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.”

“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.”

“Realists do not fear the results of their study.”

“If it were desired to reduce man to nothing, it would be necessary only to give his work a character of uselessness”

“It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?”

“There are four questions of value in life... What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.”

The soul is healed by being with children.

I love mankind, he said, but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.

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

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, dont say that youve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

And so I ask myself: Where are your dreams? And I shake my head and mutter: How the years go by! And I ask myself again: What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look, I say to myself, how cold it is becoming all over the world! And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .

In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because youre bound to grow out of your old ideals; theyre smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from the splinters and dust. But the heart longs for something different! And it is vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart and bring back to life everything that can send the blood rushing wildly through the body, fill the eyes with tears--everything that can delude you so well!

I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I dont know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I dont treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, lets say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I cant explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot get even with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I dont treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!

And so these refined parents rejected their five-year-old girl to all kinds of torture. They beat her, kicked her, flogged her, for no reason that they themselves knew of. The child’s whole body was covered in bruises. Eventually they devised a new refinement. Under the pretext that the child dirtied her bed (as though a five-year-old deep in her angelic sleep could be punished for that), they forced her to eat excrement, smearing it all over her face. And it was the mother that did it! And that woman would lock her daughter up in the outhouse until morning and she did so even on the coldest nights, when it was freezing. Just imagine the woman being able to sleep with the child’s cries coming from that outhouse! Imagine that little creature, unable to even understand what is happening to her, beating her sore little chest with her tiny fist, weeping hot, unresentful, meek tears, and begging ‘gentle Jesus’ to help her… ...let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, only to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.

O principal é não mentir. Quem mente para si mesmo e dá ouvido à sua própria mentira chega a tal extremo que não consegue ver nenhuma verdade em si ou naqueles que o rodeiam e, por conseguinte, perde completamente o respeito por si e pelos outros. (...) Quem mente a si próprio pode ser o primeiro a ofender-se. Às vezes, é tão agradável uma pessoa se ofender, não é verdade? O indivíduo sabe que ninguém o injuriou, que tudo não passa de simples invenção, que ele próprio mentiu e exagerou apenas para criar um quadro, para fazer de um grão uma montanha - sabe tudo e, no entanto, se ofende. Ofende-se a ponto se sentir prazer na ofensa e, desse modo, atinge o verdadeiro ódio...

- Escute mais isso. Por outro lado, forças jovens, frescas, sucumbem em vão por falta de apoio, e isso aos milhares, e isso em toda parte! Cem, mil boas ações e iniciativas que poderiam ser implementadas e reparadas com o dinheiro da velha, destinado a um mosteiro! Centenas, talvez milhares de existências encaminhadas; dezenas de famílias salvas da miséria, da desagregação, da morte, da depravação, das doenças venéreas - e tudo isso com o dinheiro dela. Mate-a e tome-lhe o dinheiro, para com sua ajuda dedicar-se depois a servir toda a humanidade e a uma causa comum: o que você acha, esse crime ínfimo não seria atenuado por milhares de boas ações? Por uma vida - milhares de vidas salvas do apodrecimento e da degeneração. Uma morte e cem vidas em troca - ora, isso é uma questão de aritimética.