Dostoyevsky

"There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one’s own, to be precisely “like other people."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky,The Idiot (via substancem)

(Source: cinnamonwind)

"To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible. You may lead a soldier out and set him facing the cannon in battle and fire at him and he’ll still hope; but read a sentence of certain death over that same soldier, and he will go out of his mind or burst into tears. Who can tell whether human nature is able to bear this without madness."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot

Kurosawa’s The Idiot, once again. Beautiful.

"There is nothing more deplorable as for example, to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing appearance, average education, to be not a fool, even kind-hearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no peculiarity, not even a weirdness, not a single idea of one’s own—to be, in fact, “just like everyone else”."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot

Still from Kurosawa’s The Idiot.

Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) reading The Idiot in The Machinist, two personal favorites. The movie is full of D’s references, take a look at Wikipedia article.