Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“So what if you’re fifty-three! Fifty isn’t the end, it’s the middle of life.

“There will be entire freedom when it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live. That is the goal to everything.”

“Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That’s how they’ve made it. Life now is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that is the whole deceit.

Oh, my friend, marriage is the moral death of any proud soul, of any independence.

The best would be no role at all, just one’s own person, isn’t that so? Nothing is more cunning than one’s own person, because no one will believe you. To be frank, I wanted to adopt the silly fool, because the silly fool is easier than

one’s own person; but since the silly fool is, after all, an extreme thing, and extreme things arouse curiosity, I finally chose my own person. Well, sir, and what is my own person? The golden mean—neither stupid nor smart, rather giftless, and dropped from the moon, as sensible people here say, isn’t that so?”

if one did some villainy or, worse, some shame, that is, disgrace, only very mean and … ludicrous, so that people would remember it for a thousand years and spit on it for a thousand years, and suddenly comes the thought: ‘One blow in the temple, and there will be nothing.’ What do I care then about people and how they’ll be spitting for a thousand years, right?”

Sobriety, solitude, and poverty—the vow of the knights of old.”

“I know I’m a worthless character, but I’m not trying to get in with the strong ones.”

Alea jacta est!”