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The Idiot QUOTES

The Idiot QUOTES

1 " Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy? "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

2 " We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

3 " It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst! "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

4 " Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

5 " 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 Dostoevsky , The Idiot

6 " How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds! "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

7 " A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

8 " I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

9 " Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

10 " Children can be told anything—anything. I've always been struck by seeing how little grown-up people understand children, how little parents even understand their own children. Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they are little and that it is too early for them to understand. What a miserable and unfortunate idea! And how readily the children detect that their fathers consider them too little to understand anything, though they understand everything. Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

11 " Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time! "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

12 " Alexandra, my eldest, here, plays the piano, or reads or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (but never finishes any); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I don't work too much, either. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

13 " The Russian soul is a dark place. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

14 " God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

15 " I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

16 " Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end up by eating one another, that's what I prophesy. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

17 " If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

18 " Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

19 " There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot

20 " But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain! "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Idiot