Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

‘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.

Do you suppose, you that sell, that this pint of yours has been sweet to me? It was tribulation I sought at the bottom of it, tears and tribulation, and I have found it, and I have tasted it: but He will pity us Who has had pity on all men, Who has understood all men and all things.

‘And what if I am wrong?’ he cried suddenly after a moment’s thought. ‘What if man is not really a scoundrel – man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind – then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.’

in order to understand any man one must be deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and get over afterwards.

Remember, dear boy, how in your childhood, when your father was living, you used to lisp your prayers at my knee, and how happy we all were in those days.

So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions and finding a kind of enjoyment in it. And yet all these questions were not new ones suddenly confronting him, they were old familiar aches.