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"Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented."
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"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right."

"Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction."

"Overconfidence blurs out the risk. Inferiority magnifies it."

"Only the eye that sees can differentiate a flower from leaves."

"Seeing's believing but feeling's the truth."

"The more you look, the less you see."

"The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong."

"What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?"

"She gave me this look " she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around."

"Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things."
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."

"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."

"If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all!"

"...everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him."

"Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic."

"If it could come about that each of us were to describe his innermost secrets "secrets which one would hesitate to tell not only to people at large, but even to one's closest friends, nay, to fear to admit even to one's own self - the world would be filled with such a stench that each one of us would choke to death. That's why, speaking in parenthesis, all our social conventions and niceties are so beneficial."

"How can you tell a man there's nothing to do? I can't imagine a situation in which there could ever be nothing to do! Do it for mankind and don't worry about the rest. There's so much to do that a lifetime won't be enough, if you look around attentively."

"But in the end I'd marry her to the one she herself loved. To a father, the man his daughter falls in love with herself always seems the worst. That's how it is."
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