Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

For that's just the way Katerina Ivanovna is by nature: as soon as the children cry, for example, even if it's because they're hungry, she immediately starts beating them.

“in order to get to know anyone, it is necessary to approach them cautiously and by stages”;

they can swallow each other alive for all I care!

‘I suppose this must be how men who are being led to the scaffold cling with their thoughts to all the things they meet along the way.’

because he must be drawn along, not pushed away. If you push a man away you'll never set him on the right path, and the same is even truer of a boy. With a boy you have to be twice as careful.

lying's a harmless activity, because it leads to the truth.

This was a gentleman who could no longer be described as young.

“Love yourself before all others, for everything in the world is founded upon self-interest.”

so many professional manipulators have battened on to the public cause and have bent all that they touched to their own interest to such a degree that they've brought the whole cause into disrepute.

And even the curve of his spine seemed on this occasion to say that he was carrying away with him a terrible personal insult.

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.

well, what was there to be proud of about that? Everyone ought to be a decent human being, and a clean one, too,

The people who have nothing to lock up are the happy ones, aren't they?’

The way they see it, it's not mankind which, moving along a historical, living path of development, will finally transmute itself into a sane society, but rather a social system which, having emanated from some mathematical head, will at once reorganize the whole of mankind and in a single instant make it virtuous and free from sin, more speedily than any living process, bypassing any historical or living path!

Pain and suffering are inevitable for persons of broad awareness and depth of heart. The truly great are, in my view, always bound to feel a great sense of sadness during their time upon earth,’

I don't want to wait for “universal happiness”. I want to live my own life, too, otherwise I'd do better not to live at all.

with your assistance, I expect to …’ ‘You expect too much,’

No, it's better in Russia: here, at least, one can blame other people for everything, and find excuses for oneself.

“Ghosts are, so to speak, shreds and fragments of other worlds, their source and origin. Of course, the man who is healthy doesn't need to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly sort of person, and so is bound, for the sake of gaining an all-round and orderly view of things, to live exclusively the life of this world. Well, but he has only to fall ill, to suffer a disruption of the normal, earthly order of things within his organism, and the possibility of there being another world begins to exert its influence; the iller he gets, the more numerous are his contacts with the other world, the result being that, when he finally dies, he goes straight there.”

‘It wasn't you I was bowing to, but the whole of human suffering,’ he said almost savagely, and went over to the window. ‘Listen,’ he added, coming back to her after a moment or two, ‘I told an insulting fellow earlier today that he wasn't worth your little finger … and that I'd done my sister an honour by making her sit next to you.’ ‘Oh, why did you tell him that? And in her presence, too!’ Sonya exclaimed in fear. ‘Sitting with me? An honour? But I mean … I don't have any honour … Oh, why did you say that?’ ‘I said it about you not because of your sin or your dishonour, but because of your great suffering. And as for your being a great sinner, that's simply a fact,’ he added, almost beside himself, ‘and you're even more of a sinner because you've mortified and betrayed yourself for nothing.

The stub of candle had long been guttering in its crooked candlestick within that wretched room, shedding its dim light on the murderer and the prostitute who had so strangely encountered each other in the reading of the eternal book.

You've committed moral suicide, you've wrecked a life … your own.

Everyone has a duty to spread education and propaganda, and the more bluntly the better,

‘There's no one, no one in the whole world more unhappy than you are now,’

“Why am I so stupid? Why is it that if others are stupid and I know for a certain fact that they're stupid, I don't want to be cleverer?” Then, Sonya, I realized that if I were to wait until everyone else had grown cleverer, I'd have to wait for a very long time

‘What? A priest? … There's no need … Where would you get the money for one? … I have no sins! … In any case, God will have to forgive me … he knows how much I've suffered! … And if he won't forgive me, there's even less need!

‘all human beings need air, air, air … That above all else!’

please don't think that I've come to interrogate you. I couldn't care a spit about that! Nothing could be further from my mind! Even if you were to reveal everything to me, all your secrets, I probably wouldn't listen, I'd spit and leave.

You've made me drunk without my ever going near the stuff. I mean, I'm drunk, Rodka! I'm drunk without vodka.

I don't drink, sir, and that's what's really wrong with me, hee-hee-hee, my not drinking's the real trouble I suffer from!

Be of great heart, and fear less.

she ended up feeling sorry for me – sorry for a hopeless case. And when a girl's heart starts to feel sorry, that is, of course, the most dangerous thing that can happen to her.

There is nothing in the world more difficult than plain speaking, and nothing easier than flattery.

Everyone must look out for himself, and the best time is had by those who're best able to deceive themselves.

The common folk are drunk all the time, the educated youth is burning itself out in vain dreams and fantasies, crippling itself on theories; Jews have come flocking in from somewhere, hiding money away, and everyone else is indulging in sexual licence.

great many men of genius have turned a blind eye to isolated acts of wrongdoing in order to stride onwards and across, without reflecting.

(In the light of failure everything appears stupid!)