The Greatest Works of Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment + The Brother's Karamazov + The Idiot + Notes from Underground + The Gambler + Demons (The Possessed / The Devils)

for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and forti

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

“Do not trouble. Make yourself quite at home. And, above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root of it all.”

Tears and agonies would at least have been life.

He had been led to the murder through his shallow and cowardly nature, exasperated moreover by privation and failure.

And what cowards they all are here, about having an opinion of their own,

you are an ascetic, a monk, a hermit! . . . A book, a pen behind your ear, a learned research — that’s where your spirit soars!

What seemed to him strangest of all was that his brother Ivan, on whom alone he had rested his hopes, and who alone had such influence on his father that he could have stopped him, sat now quite unmoved, with downcast eyes, apparently waiting with interest to see how it would end, as though he had nothing to do with it.

“Why in such haste?” asked Svidrigaïlov, looking at him curiously. “Everyone has his plans,” Raskolnikov answered gloomily and impatiently.