“I could not become malicious. In fact, I could not become anything: neither bad nor good, neither a scoundrel or an honest man, neither a hero nor insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something.”
—Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (via belgale)
July 2011
24 posts
“He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love.”
—The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky (via thesunalsosets)
“But go and get at the truth there, and then come and tell me. Anyway, it’s easier going to the other world if one knows what there is there.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov (via ichbinvogelfrei)
“If he laughs well, he’s a good man.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via upstairstotheleft)
“I’m always afraid that my absurd manner may discredit the thought or the leading idea. I have no elocution. My gestures are always inappropriate, and that makes people laugh, and degrades my ideas. I’ve no sense of proportion, either, and that’s the great thing; that’s the chief thing in fact… I know it’s better for me to sit still and keep quiet. When I persist in keeping quiet, I seem very sensible, and what’s more I think things over. But now it’s better for me to talk.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. (via kirstylouloumitchell)
“Oh, yes, we shall be in chains and there will be no freedom, but then, in our great sorrow, we shall rise again to joy, without which man cannot live nor God exist, for God gives joy: it’s His privilege — a grand one. Ah, man should be dissolved in prayer! What should I be underground there without God? Rakitin’s laughing! If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground. One cannot exist in prison without God; it’s even more impossible than out of prison. And then we men underground will sing from the bowels of the earth a glorious hymn to God, with Whom is joy. Hail to God and His joy! I love Him!”
—The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (via hreinleiki)
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Idiot)
“Yes, life is full, there is life even underground,” he began again. “You wouldn’t believe, Alexey, how I want to live now, what a thirst for existence and consciousness has sprung up in me within these peeling walls… And what is suffering? I am not afraid of it, even if it were beyond reckoning. I am not afraid of it now. I was afraid of it before… And I seem to have such strength in me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
—Dostoevsky; The Brothers Karamazov (via ohgreatintentions)
“Against the wall, the firing squad ready. Then he got a reprieve. Suppose they had shot Dostoevsky? Before he wrote all that? I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered, not directly. There are billions of people who have never read him and never will. But as a young man I know that he got me through the factories, past the whores, lifted me high through the night and put me down in a better place. Even while in the bar drinking with the other derelicts, I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a reprieve, it gave me one, allowed me to look directly at those rancid faces in my world, death pointing its finger, I held fast, an immaculate drunk sharing the stinking dark with my brothers”
—
#Bukowski on #Dostoevsky
(via evascribblenotes)
“But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way and in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness!”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, 1872 (via wonderfulambiguity)
“Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.”
—Einstein (via claerwen)
