One can say many things about the history of the world—except that it is rational. Give man every earthly blessing, satisfy his every desire, quench his slightest thirst, and he would still destroy what he has—just to prove his freedom.
(Notes from Underground)
[Charles Dickens] told me that all the good simple people in his novels are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Nobody ever got to a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
(Crime and Punishment)
