Dostoievsky Y Quotes & Sayings

I'm a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I've read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I've read of in books and though I try and try, I can't see them with my mind's eye. I know Moscow from what I've seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it's no good, I know that what I see isn't that at all. I'm a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I'm just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who've got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them - how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere? — W. Somerset Maugham

It was in vain that he exclaimed in his hour of lucidity, "It is easy to talk about all sorts of immoral
acts; but would one have the courage to carry them through? For example, I could not bear to break my
word or to kill; I should languish, and eventually I should die as a result - that would be my fate." From
the moment that assent was given to the totality of human experience, the way was open to others who,
far from languishing, would gather strength from lies and murder. Nietzsche's responsibility lies in having legitimized, for reasons of method - and even if only for an instant - the opportunity for dishonesty of
which Dostoievsky had already said that if one offered it to people, one could always be sure of seeing
them rushing to seize it. — Albert Camus

With that in mind, Luke closed his eyes and thought determinedly of Dominic's smile. The next morning, his father's helicopter crashed in Colombia. — Alessandra Hazard

But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Today's believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. — Simone De Beauvoir

Talking of suicide, it is perhaps noteworthy that both of Dostoievsky's characters kill themselves: Stavrogin out of indifference and self disgust; Kirilov, after years of planning the gesture, in order to demonstrate to mankind that there is no God and that men are free to do as they please. My suicide will be less didactic. — Nanavira Thera

It's the power of the brand. We've never formally advertised. — Sara Blakely

The humour of Dostoievsky is the humour of a barloafer who ties a kettle to a dog's tail. — W. Somerset Maugham

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution. — E. O. Wilson

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia. — Antal Szerb

Then you're going to take off your suit and show me just how much you missed your phone cord."
"And the attachment."
"And the attachment. — Sylvain Reynard

I feel about John ['s gospel] like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn't claim to understand her.
(Following Jesus, p. 27.) — N. T. Wright

I doubt whether the Revolution has, in essentials, changed Russia at all. Reading Gogol, or Dostoevsky for that matter, one realizes how completely the Soviet regime has fallen back on to, and perhaps invigorated, the old Russia. Certainly there is much more of Gogol and Dostoievsky in the regime than there is of Marx. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Remember, nothing succeeds without toil. — Sophocles

Wine is not discovered but made: it is an artifact that can be appraised that can be appraised aesthetically — Tim Crane

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. — Vladimir Nabokov

A detailed
analysis of the most famous novels would show, in different perspectives each time, that the essence of
the novel lies in this perpetual alteration, always directed toward the same ends, that the artist makes in
his own experience. Far from being moral or even purely formal, this alteration aims, primarily, at unity
and thereby expresses a metaphysical need. The novel, on this level, is primarily an exercise of the
intelligence in the service of nostalgic or rebellious sensibilities. It would be possible to study
this quest for unity in the French analytical novel and in Melville, Balzac, Dostoievsky, or Tolstoy — Albert Camus

I continue to vote against such spending increases, but sometimes I think some of my Republican colleagues forgot that we were sent here to shrink the federal government, not to grow it. — Jeff Miller

If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational. — David Chipperfield

Art is art, and journalism is journalism. — Lance Reddick

Part of understanding the notion of Justice is to recognize the disproportions among which we live ... it takes an awful lot of living with the powerless to really understand what it is like to be powerless, to have your voice, thoughts, ideas and concerns count for very little. We, who have been given much, whose voices can be heard, have a great duty and responsibility to make our voices heard with absolute integrity for those who are powerless. — John O'Donohue

we are persons who "don't know what we think until we see what we write, — Lucretia B. Yaghjian

A lot of people don't know this, but Toronto is probably the most multicultural city in North America. — Stephen Amell