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date: 07 February 2025

Fedor Dostoevsky 1821–81
Russian novelist 

  1. If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.
    The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) bk. 2, ch. 6
  2. The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
    The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) bk. 3, ch. 3
  3. If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
    The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) bk. 5, ch. 4
  4. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?
    The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) bk. 5, ch. 4
  5. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
    The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) bk. 5, ch. 5
  6. Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honour those whom they have slain.
    The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) bk. 6, ch. 3
  7. To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible punishment so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
    House of the Dead (1862) pt. 1, ch. 1
  8. Beauty will save the world.
    The Idiot (1868) pt. 3, ch. 5
  9. In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.
    Notes from Underground (1864) pt. 1, ch. 7
  10. What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
    Notes from Underground (1864) pt. 1, ch. 7 (tr. C. Garnett)
  11. Petersburg, the most abstract and premeditated city on earth.
    Notes from Underground (1864)