"Humiliate the reason and distort the soul."
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Quote collection
Fyodor Dostoevsky quotes (page 14 of 35)
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"Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time."
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"It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader."
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"Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible."
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"And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!"
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"There is no virtue if there is no immortality."
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"For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering."
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"Hell is the inability to love."
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"A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth."
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"You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?"
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"Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!"
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"There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless."
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"A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel."
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"Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath."
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"Brother, I’m not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter – this is what life is, herein lies its task."
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"Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw."
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"To love someone means to see him as God intended him."
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"From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man."
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"It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?"
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"Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula."
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