The Idiot Quotes

“Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“It is an unchristian religion, in the first place!' the prince resumed in great agitation and with excessive sharpness. 'That's in the first place, and secondly, Roman Catholicism is even worse than atheism - that's my opinion. Yes, that's my opinion! Atheism merely preaches a negation, but Catholicism goes further: it preaches a distorted Christ, a Christ calumniated and defamed by it, the opposite of Christ! It preaches Antichrist - I swear it does, I assure you it does! This is my personal opinion, an opinion I've held for a long time, and it has worried me a lot myself. ... Roman Catholicism believes that the Church cannot exist on earth without universal temporal power, and cries: Non possumus! In my opinion, Roman Catholicism isn't even a religion, but most decidedly a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinated to that idea, beginning with faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne and took up the sword; and since then everything has gone on in the same way, except that they've added lies, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition wickedness. They have trifled with the most sacred, truthful, innocent, ardent feelings of the people, have bartered it all for money, for base temporal power. And isn't this the teaching of Antichrist? Isn't it clear that atheism had to come from them? And it did come from them, from Roman Catholicism itself! Atheism originated first of all with them: how could they believe in themselves? It gained ground because of abhorrence of them; it is the child of their lies and their spiritual impotence! Atheism! In our country it is only the upper classes who do not believe, as Mr Radomsky so splendidly put it the other day, for they have lost their roots. But in Europe vast numbers of the common people are beginning to lose their faith - at first from darkness and lies, and now from fanaticism, hatred of the Church and Christianity!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“We degrade Providence too much by attributing our ideas to it out of annoyance at being unable to understand it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Let me add, however, that in every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others, though you wrote volumes about it and spent thirty-five years in explaining your idea; something will always be left that will obstinately refuse to emerge from your head and that will remain with you for ever and you will die without having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps the most vital point of your idea.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“But people will laugh at all sorts of things.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Murder by legal process is immeasurably more dreadful than murder by a brigand. A man who is murdered by brigands is killed at night in a forest or somewhere else, and up to the last moment he still hopes that he will be saved. There have been instances when a man whose throat had already been cut, was still hoping, or running away or begging for his life to be spared. But here all this last hope, which makes it ten times easier to die, is taken away FOR CERTAIN; here you have been sentenced to death, and the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no agony greater than that. Take a soldier and put him in front of a cannon in battle and fire at him and he will still hope, but read the same soldier his death sentence FOR CERTAIN, and he will go mad or burst out crying. Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness? Why this cruel, hideous, unnecessary, and useless mockery? Possibly there are men who have sentences of death read out to them and have been given time to go through this torture, and have then been told, You can go now, you've been reprieved. Such men could perhaps tell us. It was of agony like this and of such horror that Christ spoke. No, you can't treat a mean like that.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Listen, Parfyon, a few moments ago you asked me a question, and this is my answer: the essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with any reasoning, or any crimes and misdemeanors or atheism; is is something entirely different and it will always be so; it is something our atheists will always overlook, and they will never talk about THAT. But the important thing is that you will notice it most clearly in a Russian heart, and that's the conclusion I've come to! This is one of the chief convictions I have acquired in our Russia. There's work to be done, Parfyon. Believe me, there's work to be done in our Russian world!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“I swear to you that I am not quite such an ass as I like to appear sometimes, although I am rather an ass, I admit.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Beauty is very difficult to judge. I’m not ready for it yet. Beauty is a mystery.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“You know, it is beyond me that one can one can walk past a tree and not feel happy seeing it? How can one talk to a man and not feel happy loving him?... there are so many wonderful things at every step and turn that even the most disoriented person would find wonderful! Observe a child, observe the rising sun, observe the grass, the way it grows, look into the eyes that look back at you and love you”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“He did not flatter me. It was I who found his appreciation flattering.”
― Feodor Dostoyevsky

“What was this festival? what was this grand, everlasting pageant to which there was no end, to which he had always, from his earliest childhood, been drawn and in which he could never take part?... Everything has its path, and everything knows its path, and with a song goes forth, and with a song returns. Only he knows nothing, and understands nothing, neither men nor sounds; he is outside it all, and an outcast.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“Isn’t it possible simply to eat me, without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me?”
― Dostoevsky

“It is better to be unhappy and know, than to happy and live as a fool.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“Դուրս է գալիս, իշխան, որ դու բոլորովին խև ես, և քեզպեսներին Աստված սիրում է:”
― Feodor Dostoevsky

“Эвлэг чанд, цэх шулууныг бүжгийн багш биш, сэтгэл зүрх л хүнд сургадаг юм.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Она смеялась, но она и негодовала.
- Спит! Вы спали! - вскричала она с презрительным удивлением.
- Это вы! - пробормотал князь, еще не совсем опомнившись и с удивлением
узнавая ее: - ах, да! Это свидание... я здесь спал.
- Видела.
- Меня никто не будил кроме вас? Никого здесь кроме вас не было? Я
думал, здесь была... другая женщина.
- Здесь была другая женщина?!
Наконец он совсем очнулся.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Ограниченному «обыкновенному» человеку нет, например, ничего легче, как вообразить себя человеком необыкновенным и оригинальным и усладиться тем без всяких колебаний. Стоило иному только капельку почувствовать в сердце своем что-нибудь из какого-нибудь общечеловеческого и доброго ощущения, чтобы немедленно убедиться, что уж никто так не чувствует, как он, что он передовой в общем развитии. Стоило иному на слово принять какую-нибудь мысль или прочитать страничку чего-нибудь без начала и конца, чтобы тотчас поверить, что это «свои собственные» и в его собственном мозгу зародились.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Лучше быть несчастным, но знать, чем счастливым, но и жить... в дураках.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Is it true, prince,
that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world’? Great Heaven! The
prince says that beauty saves the world! And I declare that he only has such
playful ideas because he’s in love!”
― Dostoievski

“Funny the things one dreams of! And later I realized that even within prison walls one can have a great life.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“When you sow your seed, when you perform your beneficence, your act of charity, in whatever shape or form, you surrender some part of your personality and absorb a part of another; you commune with another being.... You’ll inevitably begin to regard all your good deeds as a science, which will take over your life and lend it purpose.... Whoever benefited from you, will pass the benefit onto others.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“A new feeling of hopeless sadness weighed on his heart; he realised suddenly that at that moment and a long time past he had been saying not what he wanted to say and had been doing the wrong thing, and that the cards he was holding in his hands and was so pleased to see were no help, no help now.”
― Fydor Dostoyesvsky, The Idiot

“It was said, though the story was not well authenticated, Gavril Ardalionovitch was particularly unlucky on this occasion, too; that seizing the opportunity while Vavara Ardalionovna was running to Lizaveta Prokofeyevna, and he was left alone with Aglaia, he had thought fit to begin talking of his passion; that, listening to him Aglaia had in spite of her tears and dejection, suddenly burst out laughing and had all at once put a strange question to him; would he, to prove his love, burn his finger in the candle? Gavril Ardalionovitch was, so the story went, petrified by the question; he was so completely taken aback and his face betrayed such extreme amazement, that Aglaia had laughed at him as though she were in hysterics. and to get away from him ran upstairs to Nina Alexandrovna where she was found by her parents.

This story was repeated to Myshkin next day by Ippolit whom being too ill to get up, sent for the prince on purpose to tell it to him. How Ippolit got hold of the story we don't know, but when Myshkin heard about the candle and the finger, he laughed so much that Ippolit was surprised. Then he suddenly began to tremble and burst into tears...”
― Fydor Dostoyesvsky, The Idiot

“What use to me is your nature, your Pavlovsk park, your sunrises and sunsets your blue sky, and your contented faces, when all this endless festival has begun by my being excluded from it? What is there for me in this beauty when, every minute, every second I am obliged, forced, to recognise that even the tiny fly, buzzing in the sunlight beside me, has its share in the banquet and the chorus, knows its place, loves it and is happy; and that I alone am an outcast, and only my cowardice has made me refuse to realise it till now.”
― Fydor Dostoyesvsky, The Idiot

“In her pride she will never forgive me for my love - and we shall both come to ruin. That's abnormal, but everything here is abnormal. You say she loves me, but is this love? Can there be such love after what I have gone through? No it's something else, not love!”
― Fydor Dostoyesvsky, The Idiot

“He had been trying during those days not to think about it, had dismissed oppressive ideas; but what lay hidden in that soul? The thought had worried him for a long time, though he had faith in that soul. And now all this must be settled and revealed that day. An awful thought! And again - 'that woman!' Why did it always seem to him that that woman was bound to appear at the last moment, and tear asunder his fate like a rotten thread?

That it had always seemed so he was ready to swear now, though he was almost delirious. If he had tried to forget 'her' of late, it was simply because he was afraid of her. Did he love that woman or hate her? He had not put that question to himself once that day. His heart was clear on one point: he knew whom he loved...”
― Fydor Dostoyesvsky, The Idiot

“He would have said that he wasn't worthy of her asking his forgiveness. Who knows, perhaps he did notice the meaning of the words, 'absurdity which cannot have the slightest consequence,' but being such a strange man, perhaps, he was relieved at those words. There is no doubt that the mere fact that he could come and see Aglaia, again without hindrance, that he was allowed to talk to her, sit with her, walk with her was the utmost bliss to him; and who knows, perhaps he would have been satisfied with that the rest of his life. (It was just this contentment that Lizaveta Prokofyevna secretly dreaded; she understood him; she dreaded many things in secret, which she could not have put into words herself)”
― Fydor Dostoyesvsky, The Idiot