The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

everybody else is witty, but I am not. To make up for it, I asked permission to speak the truth, since everybody knows that only those who are not witty speak the truth.

She was a novelty, and it was an accepted thing to invite her to certain evenings, in magnificent costume, her hair done up as if for an exhibition, and to sit her there like a lovely picture to adorn the evening, just as some people, for their evenings, borrow some painting, vase, statue, or screen from their friends for one time only.

THEY CONSTANTLY complain that in our country there are no practical people; that of political people, for example, there are many; of generals there are also many; of various managers, however many you need, you can at once find any sort you like—but of practical people there are none.

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the best recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man,

But a certain dullness of mind, it seems, is almost a necessary quality, if not of every active man, at least of every serious maker of money.

Russian liberalism is not an attack on the existing order of things, but is an attack on the very essence of our things, on the things themselves and not merely on their order, not on Russian order, but on Russia itself.

A coward is someone who is afraid and runs away; but someone who is afraid but doesn’t run away is not a coward yet,”

you men of science, industry, associations, salaries, and the rest? What is it? Credit? What is credit? What will credit lead you to?”

Without recognizing any moral foundations except the satisfaction of personal egoism and material necessity? Universal peace, universal happiness—from necessity!

The law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us. You laugh? You don’t believe in the devil? Disbelief in the devil is a French notion, a frivolous notion. Do you know who the devil is? Do you know what his name is? And without even knowing his name, you laugh at his form, following Voltaire’s example,11 at his hoofs, his tail, and his horns, which you yourselves have invented; for the unclean spirit is a great and terrible spirit, and not with the hoofs and horns you have invented for him.

Hurrying, clanging, banging, and speeding, they say, for the happiness of mankind! ‘It’s getting much too noisy and industrial in mankind, there is too little spiritual peace,’

a friend of mankind with shaky moral foundations is a cannibal of mankind,

beauty will save the world!

It seems to me that I have just written something terribly stupid, but I have no time to correct it, as I said; besides, I give myself my word purposely not to correct a single line in this manuscript, even if I notice that I am contradicting myself every five lines. I precisely want to determine tomorrow during the reading whether the logical course of my thought is correct; whether I notice my own mistakes, and thus whether everything I have thought through during these six months in this room is true or mere raving.

consider me a crazy person or even a schoolboy, or most likely of all, a man condemned to death, to whom it naturally seemed that all people except himself value their life too little, are accustomed to spending it too cheaply, too lazily, use it much too shamelessly, and are therefore unworthy of it one and all!

The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!

The point in life is Jesus Christ. To grow deeper in faith and in love for Him. That's the ultimate discovery.

In sowing your seed, in sowing your ‘charity,’ your good deed in whatever form it takes, you give away part of your person and receive into yourself part of another’s; you mutually commune in each other; a little more attention, and you will be rewarded with knowledge, with the most unexpected discoveries.

if he came to me as a “comforter” (because even if he was silent, he would still be coming as a comforter, I explained that to him), then it meant that each time he would be reminding me still more of death.

there is the temptation: nature has so greatly limited my activity by her three-week sentence that suicide may be the only thing I still have time to begin and end of my own will. So, maybe I want to use my last opportunity of doing something? A protest is sometimes no small matter …

You have no tenderness, only truth, that makes it unfair.”

“Delicacy and dignity are taught by one’s own heart, not by a dancing master,”

you remember first of all that reason did not abandon you during the whole course of your dream; you even remember that you acted extremely cleverly and logically for that whole long, long time when you were surrounded by murderers, when they were being clever with you, concealed their intentions, treated you in a friendly way, though they already had their weapons ready and were only waiting for some sort of sign; you remember how cleverly you finally deceived them, hid from them; then you realize that they know your whole deception by heart and merely do not show you that they know where you are hiding; but you are clever and deceive them again—all that you remember clearly. But why at the same time could your reason be reconciled with such obvious absurdities and impossibilities, with which, among other things, your dream was filled?

Why, also, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary force of impression, that along with the dream you are leaving behind something you have failed to fathom? You smile at the absurdity of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart;

Can one love everyone, all people, all one’s neighbors? I have often asked myself that question. Of course not, and it is even unnatural. In an abstract love for mankind, one almost always loves oneself.

your sister Adelaida once said of my portrait that one could overturn the world with such beauty. But I have renounced the world;

There are people of whom it is difficult to say anything that would present them at once and fully, in their most typical and characteristic aspect; these are those people who are usually called “ordinary” people, the “majority,” and who indeed make up the vast majority in any society.

Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely “usual” people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible—and perhaps uninteresting as well. In our opinion, the writer should try to seek out interesting and instructive nuances even among ordinary people.

there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly “like everybody else.”

I am another opinion etirely. I think there is a certain beauty in that, if the exterior ordinarity is accompanied with interior excelence.

As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own “convictions.”

Pirogov never even doubts that he is a genius, even higher than any genius; he is so far from doubting it that he never even asks himself about it; anyhow, questions do not exist for him.

The thing is that a clever “usual” man, even if he imagines himself momentarily (or perhaps throughout his life) to be a man of genius and originality, nevertheless preserves in his heart a little worm of doubt, which drives him so far that the clever man sometimes ends up in complete despair;

A profound and continual awareness of his talentlessness and at the same time an insuperable desire to be convinced that he was an independent man, painfully wounded his heart,

There was only one thing that she sometimes noticed in herself—that she, too, was perhaps angry, that in her, too, there was a great deal of self-love and even all but pinched vanity;

If I had been fifteen, I would have turned coward, but, being ten, I feared nothing and pushed my way through the crowd up to the very porch of the palace, just as Napoleon was dismounting from his horse.”

you have no money, and I never have any: so here we are in the street without a shirt to our name.” “It’s better than having a shirt and no name,”

The majority of the guests, despite their imposing appearance, were even rather empty people, who, incidentally, in their self-satisfaction did not know themselves that much of what was good in them was only a contrivance, for which, moreover, they were not to blame, for they had acquired it unconsciously and by inheritance.

The Russian people, as soon as they reach the shore, as soon as they believe it’s the shore, are so glad of it that they immediately go to the ultimate pillars.36 Why is that?

but from spiritual pain, spiritual thirst, from the longing for a lofty cause, a firm shore, a native land, in which we’ve ceased to believe because we’ve never known it!

“Well, it’s no disaster! A man, too, comes to an end, and this was just a clay pot!”

True, for all those days he had tried not to think of it, had driven the painful thoughts away, but what was hidden in that soul? This question had long tormented him, though he trusted in that soul.

You could not love him because you are too proud … no, not proud, I’m mistaken, but because you are vain … and not even that: you are selfish to the point of madness, of which your letters to me also serve as proof. You could not love him, simple as he is, and may even have despised him and laughed at him to yourself; you could love only your own disgrace and the incessant thought that you had been disgraced and offended.

with your free will and your money, that is, with the two things that distinguish each of us from the quadrupeds!

“Hidden from the wise and clever, and revealed unto babes,51 I said that about him before, but now I’ll add that God has preserved the babe himself, saved him from the abyss, he and all his saints!”