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"In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you're bound to grow out of your old ideals; they're smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from the splinters and dust. But the heart longs for something different! And it is vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart and bring back to life everything that can send the blood rushing wildly through the body, fill the eyes with tears--everything that can delude you so well!"
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Exlpore more Reflection quotes
"He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals."
"I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more."
"What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies."
"Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."
"Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond."
"What stays with you longest and deepest? Of curious panics, of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?"
"[There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself."
"What would you do if you only had one day left in this world? Spend it with the people you love? Travel to the far corners of the earth to see as many wonders as possible? Eat nothing but chocolate? Would you apologize for all your mistakes? Would you stand up to those you'd never had the courage to face? Would you tell your secret crush that you loved him or her? Why is it that we wait till the last minute to do the things we should be doing all along?"
"Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions."
"My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots."
Explore more quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught."
"And, beginning to grind his teeth again, Pyotr Petrovich admitted that he'd been a fool--but only to himself, of course."
"You needn't be afraid of life! Life is so good when you do something that is good and just."
"His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, usolved doubt. He is one of those who doesn't want millions, but an answer to their questions."
"There's something here, my dear boy, that you don't understand yet. A man will fall in love with some beauty, with a woman's body, or even a part of a woman's body (a sensualist can understand that) and he'll abandon his own children for her, sell his father and mother, and his country, Russia, too. If he's honest, he'll steal; if he's humane, he'll murder; if he's faithful, he'll deceive."
"The criminal who revolted against society hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. In spite of different opinions, everyone will acknowledge that there are acts which everywhere and always, under no matter what legal system, are beyond doubt criminal, and should be regarded as long as man is man."
"Indeed, in that sense we're all rather often almost like mad people, only with the slight difference that the 'sick' are somewhat madder than we are, so that it's necessary to draw a line here."
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