 Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that It was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature. . . and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Category Archives: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The punishment of useless work
| To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible punishment so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Intense enjoyments in despair
| In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Want of independent choice
| What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever It may lead.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Above all, do not lie to yourself
| Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Unable to love
| What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Beauty is mysterious and terrible
| Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Pain and suffering for a large intelligence
| Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The beastial cruelty of man
| People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The devil in man’s own image
| If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) |
