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Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Fyodor Dostoevsky
Age: 60 †
Born: 1821
Born: January 1
Died: 1881
Died: January 1
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Poet
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
Dostoievski
Fyodor Dostoievski
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoievski
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
Men
Wisps
Straw
Straws
Cling
Drowning

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One must be a great man indeed to be able to hold out even against common sense. Or else a fool.
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Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!
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How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?
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Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It's still possible to love one's neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.
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But how could you live and have no story to tell?
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But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
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One can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan't understand them thoroughly.
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Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.
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If the person laughs well, they are a good person.
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The Russian soul is a dark place.
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I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.
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One's own free and unfettered volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness - that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it cannot fit into any classification and the omission of which sends all systems and theories to the devil.
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Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.
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It's in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.
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Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.
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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.
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The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.
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If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
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Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment! Oh, self-satisfied people: with what proud self-satisfaction such babblers are ready to utter their pronouncements! If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn't have the heart to teach me.
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Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
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