“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread".”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“In place of the clear and rigid ancient law, You [oh Lord] made man decide about good and evil for himself, with no other guidance than Your example. But did it never occur to You that man would disregard Your example, even question it, as well as Your truth, when he was subjected to so fearful a burden as freedom of choice?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“But the foolish children will have to learn some day that, rebels though they be and riotous from nature, they are too weak to maintain the spirit of mutiny for any length of time.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship. But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
“It is that instinctive need of having a worship in common that is the chief suffering of every man, the chief concern of mankind from the beginning of times. It is for that universality of religious worship that people destroyed each other by sword.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Born place: in Moscow, Russian Federation
Born date November 11, 1821
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“If the boy did have a good and loving mother somewhere, surely they would find her.
God only knew how she wanted to believe it. Every single day, she practiced her detachment skills, trying not to care about everything that was wrong with the world. Or rather...to care, but in a suitably civilized manner, with an admirable commitment that might still be set aside when she came home to Morten and her family, complete with well-reasoned and coherent opinions of the humanist persuasion. Right now she felt more like one of those manic women from the animal protection societies, with wild hair and ever wilder eyes. Desperate.”
― Lene Kaaberbøl, quote from The Boy in the Suitcase
“there are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-panelled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffee-houses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close-up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter’s girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river. *”
― Amos Oz, quote from A Tale of Love and Darkness
“A writer’s brush is a warrior’s bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from River of Stars
“É un luogo romantico, sì" convenne Poirot, "e tranquillo. Il sole brilla e il mare è un incanto. Ma dimentica, signorina Brewster, che il male si annida dovunque, sotto il sole.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from The Sunset Limited
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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