"my love had grown one with my soul; it became darker, but did not go out"
— Mikhail Lermontov (Hero of Our Time)

"Out of life's storm I carried only a few ideas - and not one feeling."
— Mikhail Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time)

"Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering..."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"You can be sincere and still be stupid."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then-- let it get even worse!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.
–The Grand Inquisitor"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"beauty will save the world"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.
That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment -- still I should want to live. Having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup even if I've not emptied it, and turn away -- where I don't know. But till I am thirty I know that my youth will triumph over everything -- every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that could overcome this frantic thirst for life. And I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is until I am thirty."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"In a morbid condition, dreams are often distinguished by their remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality. The resulting picture is sometimes monstrous, but the setting and the whole process of the presentation sometimes happen to be so probable, and with details so subtle, unexpected, yet artistically consistent with the whole fullness of the picture, that even the dreamer himself would be unable to invent them in reality, though he were as much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev. Such dreams, morbid dreams, are always long remembered and produce a strong impression on the disturbed and already excited organism of the person.Raskolnikov had a terrible dream."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (White Nights)

"I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"Mas, não obstante, eu acrescento que em qualquer pensamento genial ou no novo pensamento humano, ou simplesmente até em qualquer pensamento humano sério, que medra da cabeça de alguém, sempre resta algo que de maneira nenhuma se pode transmitir a outras pessoas, embora voc6e tenha garatujado volumes inteiros e passado trinta e cinco anos interpretando o seu pensamento; sempre restará algo que de maneira alguma desejará sair do seu crânio e permanecerá com você para todo o sempre; e assim você acaba morrendo sem ter transmitido a ninguém talvez o mais importante da sua idéia."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"... in St. Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe. (Cities and be intentional or unintentional."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.
But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Act 5, scene 5, 19–28 "
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"I would challenge to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!"
— William Shakespeare

"The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers."
— William Shakespeare

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day."
— William Shakespeare (Henry V)

"Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
Hanlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't!"
— William Shakespeare

"When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married."
— William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing)

"So wise so young, they say, do never live long."
— William Shakespeare (The Tragedy of King Richard III)

"THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do."
— Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author)

"Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart."
— Luigi Pirandello

""manuscripts don't burn" (рукописи не горят)"
— Mikhail Bulgakov

" * 'You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.

'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!'
"
— Mikhail Bulgakov

""There's only one degree of freshness — the first, which makes it also the last""
— Mikhail Bulgakov

"When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."
— William Shakespeare (King Lear)

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)