Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot Quotes
Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.
A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.
We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.
Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?
How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!
Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!
I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.
Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end up by eating one another, that's what I prophesy.
If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.
It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.