The Gambler and Other Stories Quotes

“Yes! All it would take is just once in my life to be careful and patient and – and that’s all there is to it! All it would take is to stand firm just once, and I can change my whole destiny in a single hour! The main thing is standing firm. Just remember what happened to me in similar circumstances seven months ago in Roulettenburg, before my final loss. Oh, that was a remarkable instance of resolve: I had lost everything, everything … I’m leaving the casino, and I see that I still have a single gulden knocking about in my waistcoat pocket. ‘Ah, so I’ll be able to buy myself some dinner!’ I thought, but after taking about a hundred steps, I changed my mind and went back. I staked that gulden on manque (this time it was manque), and there really is something peculiar in the feeling, when you’re alone, in a foreign country, far from your native land and friends, and you don’t know if you’re going to eat that day, you stake your last gulden, the very, very last one! I won and twenty minutes later I walked out of the casino with 170 gulden in my pocket. That is a fact, sir! That’s what your last gulden can mean sometimes! And what if I had lost heart, if I hadn’t dared to bring myself to do it? … Tomorrow, tomorrow it will all be over! 1866”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“The side whiskers indeed were quite handsome. But he stroked them so very zealously that looking at him, one might very well think that first just the side whiskers had been brought into the world, and then later the gentleman was attached to them in order to stroke them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“If you like – I don’t know. I only know that I need to win, that it is also my only way out. And that’s perhaps why I think that I will win without fail.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“A true gentleman, even if he loses his entire fortune, must not show emotion. Money is supposed to be so far beneath a gentleman that it’s almost not worth thinking about.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“Is it really impossible to come into contact with the gaming table without at once becoming infected with superstition?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“And so — if it's shame, let it be shame, if it's disgrace, let it be disgrace, if it's degradation, let it be degradation, and the worse, the better — that's what I chose.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“Only among the French and perhaps some other Europeans has the form been so well defined that one can look extremely dignified and yet be the most undignified person.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“Well, sir, isn’t that a majestic spectacle: a century or two of uninterrupted labour, patience, intelligence, honesty, character, firmness, calculation, and a stork on the roof! What else could you want, after all there’s nothing loftier than this, and it’s from this point of view that they begin to judge the entire world, and the guilty, that is, those who differ from them in the slightest respect, are immediately punished. Well, if that’s the case, I’d rather kick up a row like a Russian or get rich at roulette. I don’t want to be Hoppe & Co. in five generations. I need money for myself, and I don’t consider myself simply to be merely something essential and subordinate to capital. I know that I have got terribly carried away, but so be it. Such are my convictions.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“On the fact that the ability to acquire capital has entered the catechism of virtues and merits of the Western civilized man, and is practically the highest one. The Russian not only is incapable of acquiring capital, he even squanders it somehow scandalously and to no purpose. Nevertheless, we Russians also need money,’ I added, ‘and consequently, we are very glad of and very susceptible to such methods as roulette, for instance, where one can suddenly become wealthy in two hours effortlessly. We find this very attractive; and since we are playing to no purpose, without any effort, we lose!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories

“There are two types of gambling: one is gentlemanly; the other is plebeian, greedy, the gambling for all sorts of riff-raff. The sharp distinction is strictly observed here and – how vile, in essence, is this distinction! A gentleman, for instance, may stake 5 or 10 louis d’or, rarely more than that; however, he may also stake a thousand francs if he is very rich, but simply for the sake of the game itself, simply for the sake of amusement, simply to observe the process of winning or losing; he must on no account show any interest in his winnings. When he wins he may, for instance, laugh out loud, or make a remark to one of the onlookers, and he may even stake again and then double it, but only out of curiosity, in order to observe the workings of chance, to calculate, but not for the plebeian desire to win. In a word, he must look upon all these gaming tables, roulette and trente et quarante,4 only as an amusement organized solely for his pleasure. He must not even suspect the greed and traps on which the bank depends. And it would not at all be a bad thing if, for instance, he were of the opinion that all the other gamblers, all this scum trembling over a gulden, were precisely the same sort of rich men and gentlemen as he, and that they were playing solely for the sake of diversion and amusement.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler and Other Stories