The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A fool with a heart and no brains is just as unhappy as a fool with brains and no heart.

Very likely he anticipated far worse things than was at all necessary; it is often so with vain persons.

All is not gold that glitters, you know;

“I can but thank you,” he said, in a tone too respectful to be sincere, “for your kindness in letting me speak, for I have often noticed that our Liberals never allow other people to have an opinion of their own, and immediately answer their opponents with abuse, if they do not have recourse to arguments of a still more unpleasant nature.”

Liberalism has just as much right to exist as has the most moral conservatism; but I am attacking Russian liberalism; and I attack it for the simple reason that a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal, he is a non-Russian liberal. Show me a real Russian liberal, and I’ll kiss him before you all, with pleasure.”

If any Russian shall have done or said anything really and absolutely original, he is to be called national from that moment, though he may not be able to talk the Russian language; still he is a national Russian. I consider that an axiom. But we were not speaking of literature; we began by discussing the socialists. Very well then, I insist that there does not exist one single Russian socialist. There does not, and there has never existed such a one, because all socialists are derived from the two classes — the landed proprietors, and the seminarists. All our eminent socialists are merely old liberals of the class of landed proprietors, men who were liberals in the days of serfdom.

“Let me add to this that in every idea emanating from genius, or even in every serious human idea — born in the human brain — there always remains something — some sediment — which cannot be expressed to others, though one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thirty years. There is always a something, a remnant, which will never come out from your brain, but will remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever, and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what may be the very essence of your idea to a single living soul.

“It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the Saviour, and to put this question to oneself: ‘Supposing that the disciples, the future apostles, the women who had followed Him and stood by the cross, all of whom believed in and worshipped Him — supposing that they saw this tortured body, this face so mangled and bleeding and bruised (and they must have so seen it) — how could they have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet have believed that He would rise again?’

“Do you know there is a limit of ignominy, beyond which man’s consciousness of shame cannot go, and after which begins satisfaction in shame? Well, of course humility is a great force in that sense, I admit that — though not in the sense in which religion accounts humility to be strength!

Every little fly that buzzed in the sun’s rays was a singer in the universal chorus, “knew its place, and was happy in it.” Every blade of grass grew and was happy. Everything knew its path and loved it, went forth with a song and returned with a song; only he knew nothing, understood nothing, neither men nor words, nor any of nature’s voices; he was a stranger and an outcast.

“Oh, but he didn’t kill himself; the pistol didn’t go off.” Aglaya insisted on hearing the whole story. She hurried the prince along, but interrupted him with all sorts of questions, nearly all of which were irrelevant.

Very likely he thought more of you than the rest of us, because he mentioned you at such a moment, though perhaps he did not know himself that he had you in his mind’s eye.” “I don’t understand you. How could he have me in view, and not be aware of it himself? And yet, I don’t know — perhaps I do.

Do you know I have intended to poison myself at least thirty times — ever since I was thirteen or so — and to write to my parents before I did it? I used to think how nice it would be to lie in my coffin, and have them all weeping over me and saying it was all their fault for being so cruel, and all that

Such a mind as they have never even dreamed of; because really, there are two minds — the kind that matters, and the kind that doesn’t matter.

“Do you know why I have just told you these lies?” She appealed to the prince, of a sudden, with the most childlike candour, and with the laugh still trembling on her lips. “Because when one tells a lie, if one insists on something unusual and eccentric — something too ‘out of the way” for anything, you know — the more impossible the thing is, the more plausible does the lie sound. I’ve noticed this. But I managed it badly; I didn’t know how to work it.”