“Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A single day is sufficient for a man to discover what happiness is.”
“It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.”
“Being in love doesn’t mean loving.”
“If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.”
“If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.”
“Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street; they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.”
“It’s curious and ridiculous how much the gaze of a prudish and painfully chaste man touched by love can sometimes express and that precisely at a moment when the man would of course sooner be glad to fall through the earth than to express anything with a word or a look.”
“If there were no God, he would have to be invented.”
“There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.”
“To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.”
“Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously.”
“Whether one showed you and execution or a little finger, you would extract an equally edifying thought from both of them, and would still be content. That’s the way to get on in life.”
“How good life is when one does something good and just!”
“Two and two make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies.”
“Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.”
“Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.”
“I’ve long stopped worrying about who invented whom – God man or man God.”
“It’s a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.”
“What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning...”
“In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone’s brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.”
“One can fall in love and still hate.”
“Woe to the man who offends a small child!”
“Luxuries are easy to take up but very difficult to give up.”
“How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?”
“Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we’re alive, we’re all the same once we’re dead. Just used-up shells.”
“But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.”
“Man is bound to lie about himself.”
“Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”
“If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.”
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