Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“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, honored sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary—never—no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible;

Poverty and beggary

“Well, when one has no one, nowhere else one can go! For every man must have somewhere to go. Since there are times when one absolutely must go somewhere!

Somewhere to go

And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink. . . . I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!”

Sympathy in drinking

The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,”

Greatness and sadness

If there’s the hundredth part of a false note in speaking the truth, it leads to a discord, and that leads to trouble. But if all, to the last note, is false in flattery, it is just as agreeable, and is heard not without satisfaction.

Truth and flattery

he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.

Life vs theory