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“poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that’s even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary—never—no one.
“Well, when one has no one, nowhere else one can go!
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic!
“You are talking and speechifying away, but tell me, would you kill the old woman yourself?” “Of course not! I was only arguing the justice of it.... It’s nothing to do with me....” “But I think, if you would not do it yourself, there’s no justice about it.... Let us have another game.”
Raskolnikov was violently agitated. Of course, it was all ordinary youthful talk and thought, such as he had often heard before in different forms and on different themes. But why had he happened to hear such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain was just conceiving... the very same ideas? And why, just at the moment when he had brought away the embryo of his idea from the old woman had he dropped at once upon a conversation about her? This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This trivial talk in a tavern had an immense influence on him in his later action; as
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“When reason fails, the devil helps!” he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.
I only say he is a nice man in his own way! But if one looks at men in all ways—are there many good ones left?
You harm yourselves running another man down....
Economic truth adds that the better private affairs are organised in society—the more whole coats, so to say—the firmer are its foundations and the better is the common welfare organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass my neighbour’s getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance.
Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that’s just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That’s what they regard as the highest point of progress.
I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.
Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a man, in the second you’re no better than a bird.
We prefer to live on other people’s ideas, it’s what we are used to! Am I right, am I right?”
think! There’s not a trace of anything of the sort,
He says he is so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing nothing.
Her gloves, as Razumihin noticed, were not merely shabby but had holes in them, and yet this evident poverty gave the two ladies an air of special dignity, which is always found in people who know how to wear poor clothes.
The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.
‘You are ill, so what appears to you is only unreal fantasy.’ But that’s not strictly logical. I agree that ghosts only appear to the sick, but that only proves that they are unable to appear except to the sick, not that they don’t exist.”
“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is?
An honour! Why, I’m... dishonourable.... Ah, why did you say that?” “It was not because of your dishonour and your sin I said that of you, but because of your great suffering. But you are a great sinner, that’s true,” he added almost solemnly, “and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. Isn’t that fearful? Isn’t it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you’ve only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything? Tell me,” he went on almost in a
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I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right...”
Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all, for ever....
But although he had almost always been by himself of late, he had never been able to feel alone.
Be the sun and all will see you.
Raskolnikov at that moment felt and knew once for all that Sonia was with him for ever and would follow him to the ends of the earth, wherever fate might take him. It wrung his heart... but he was just reaching the fatal place.
She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and that at last the moment had come....
