Dostoyevsky

"Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky (via mtgardella)

(Source: thus-spoke-mia)

"He wants money for nothing, without waiting or working! We’ve grown used to having everything ready made, to walking on crutches, to having our food chewed for us. Then the great hour struck, and every man showed himself in his true colors."

— Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky (via yuhudit)

"Many times I’ve asked myself whether there is anything in the world that could crush my frantic, indecent appetite for life, and have decided that it looks as though nothing of that sort exists."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via fromtheinsight)

"If you run after two hares, you will catch neither."

— Russian Proverb, as quoted in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (via internalpolicy)

"He lay like that for a very long time. Occasionally he seemed to wake up, and in those moments noticed that night had come long ago, yet it did not occur to him to get up. Finally he noticed light, as if it were already daytime. He was lying on his back on the sofa, still stupefied from his recent oblivion. Terrible, desperate screams came to him sharply from the street—which, by the way, he heard under his window every night between two and three o’clock. They were what wakened him now. “Ah! So the drunks are coming out of the taverns,” he thought, “it’s past two.” And suddenly he jumped up as if someone had torn him from the sofa. “What! Past two already!” He sat down on the sofa and—remembered everything! Suddenly, in an instant, he remembered everything!"

— Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (via liberumarbitriumindifferentiae)

"People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it,"

— The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, p. 220. (via thisisntlisa)

"There is something indescribably moving in the way nature in Petersburg, suddenly with the coming of spring, reveals herself in all her might and glory, in all the splendour with which heaven has endowed her, in the way she blossoms out, dresses up, decks herself out with flowers….She reminds me somehow rather forcibly of that girl, ailing and faded, upon whom you sometimes look with pity or with a certain compassionate affection, or whom you simply do not notice at all, but who in the twinkling of an eye and only for one fleeting moment becomes by some magic freak of chance indescribably fair and beautiful; and, stunned and fascinated, you ask yourself what power it was that made those sad and wistful eyes blaze forth with such a fire? What caused the rush of blood to her pale and hollow cheeks What brought passion to that sweet face? Why did her bosom heave so wildly?"

— White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via ituccio)

"Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?"

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (via hbanana22)

"Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged"

— Hemingway, green hills of africa (via steamthings)

"I always fancied that you would take me to some place where there was a huge wicked spider, big as a man, and we should spend our lives looking at it and being afraid of it. That’s how our love would spend itself."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, 1872, trans. Constance Garnett

[prompted by thewebpoet’s word suggestion: “iniquity”] (via proustitute)

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible."

— Dostoevsky (via iamnot-thereforeithink)

"Sometimes, on holidays, I would go to the Nevsky Prospect in the afternoon and enjoy a walk along the sunny side. That is, I didn’t actually enjoy my walk at all: I experienced an endless series of torments, crushing humiliations and attacks of spleen; but probably that was necessary to me. I darted like a minnow through passers-by, in a most ungraceful fashion, constantly giving way to generals. officers of the Horse Guards and the Hussars, and fine ladies; at those moments I felt a spasmodic pain in my heart and hot flushes down my spine at the thought of the wretched inadequacy of my costume and the mean vulgarity of my small figure darting about.
It was an agonizing torment, a never-ending unbearable humiliation, caused by the suspicion, constantly growing into clear-cut certainty, that compared to them I was a fly, a nasty obscene fly - cleverer, better educated, nobler than any of them, that goes without saying - but a fly, always getting out of everybody’s way, humiliated and slighted by everybody. Why I courted this torment, why I went to Nevsky Prospect, I don’t know. But I felt drawn there on every possible occasion."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Notes from Underground. (via saybutlittle)

(Source: perfectnonfreedom)

"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)

(Source: hermineisinhell)

"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)