top of page
"I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Isolation quotes

"Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his."

"The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I'm a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon."

"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."

"To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand."

"You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that."

"I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world."

"The geographical isolation and lack of television made world happenings and problems seem remote."

"If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain."

"There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world."
Explore more quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century."

"And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!"

"Perhaps," you will add, grinning, "those who have never been slapped will also not understand" - thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur."

"Why I would sell the whole world for a single kopek, just so that nobody would bother me. Should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea now? I'll say let the world go to hell so long as I can have my tea whenever I want it."

"Oh, those grumblers! They all take principles as motives and dare not follow their desires."

"I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart, I am told this is due to fear."

"Then this God does exist according to you?""He does not exist, but He is. In the stone there is no pain, but in the fear of the stone is the pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god."

"We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him."

"They say, the sun brings life to the world. The sun will rise and look is it not a corpse? Everything is dead and there are corpses everywhere. Just people and around them silence__that is the world! "Love one another"__who said that? Whose command is that? The pendulum swings unfeelingly, antagonistically. It's two o'clock at night. Her slippers are standing by her bed, as if waiting for her.... No, seriously, when they take her away tomorrow, what shall I do?"

"Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else. Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!"
bottom of page