Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Some Quotes from Dostoevsky

"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man."

"Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded."

"The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness."

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

"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."

"The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month."

"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."

"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid."

"The soul is healed by being with children."

"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!" "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."

"To love someone means to see him as God intended him."

"To live without Hope is to Cease to live."

"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."

"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."

"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."

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

"Realists do not fear the results of their study."

"The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions."

"Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death."

"Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship."

"Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost for ever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."

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