Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even it if goes wrong, it lives.”

Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Work

Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. more

You May Also Like

“It was the yearning she related to. Shriver seemed to understand the specific human pain of wanting and pushing away at the same time. It left her with a gorgeous ache, and when she turned the last page of the book and closed the cover, Norah's connection to the writer felt absolute. It was a breathless, consuming rapture....”

“Until now the whole of humanity has been in some wayor other condemning life and the joy and beauty of life. Until now the past of humanity has been life-negative. And to be life-negative is to be against God, because lifeis God. God is not separated from nature, people or life. All the organized religions have been life-negative. All the organized religions destroy something valuable in you. They make you feel guilty about yourself.  They make you feel guilty about being life-affirmative. They make yo ufeel guilty about loving life. They make you guilty about enjoying the joy and beauty of life. Meditation is helping you to be free of all guilt, and to rejoice in life. Meditation helps you to rejoice in even small things of life. Then even having a cup of coffee, taking a walk in nature or meeting a friend starts having  a sacred significance. You can have a cup of coffee in a prayerful way, and with such meditativeness that there is no need to go to a church or temple. Meditation is a help to rejoicein life and also help others to be happy, because bliss is divine.”

“It’s funny how our desires often tend to circle around the whims and fancies of others rather than the self. One school of thought has a convincing explanation that this is because we live in a society that makes us want to be pleasing to others more than the self--a rather selfless trait, so to think. But then there is this other theory which eventually concludes that we do all of this to please no one but the self...because praise and compliments are what the devil thrives on, and we are in no significant way any different.”

“Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the universals are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature.”