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

Tears and agonies would at least have been life.

“Listen,” he said, “you’re a first-rate fellow, but among your other failings, you’re a loose fish, that I know, and a dirty one, too. You are a feeble, nervous wretch, and a mass of whims, you’re getting fat and lazy and can’t deny yourself anything — and I call that dirty because it leads one straight into the dirt. You’ve let yourself get so sla

“And . . . the worst of it was he was so coarse, so dirty, he had the manners of a pothouse; and . . . and even admitting that he knew he had some of the essentials of a gentleman . . . what was there in that to be proud of? Everyone ought to be a gentleman and more than that . . . and all the same (he remembered) he, too, had done little things . 

It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most. . . . But I am talking too much. It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing.

“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.”

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

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

In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals — more or less, of course.

But you’ve ceased to believe in your theory already, what will you run away with? And what would you do in hiding? It would be hateful and difficult for you, and what you need more than anything in life is a definite position, an atmosphere to suit you. And what sort of atmosphere would you have? If you ran away, you’d come back to yourself. You ca