Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes About Character
-
And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolations that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent nineteenth-century man must be, is morally bound to be, an essentially characterless creature; and a man of character, a man of action - an essentially limited creature. This is my conviction at the age of forty. I am forty now, and forty years - why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest of old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral!
→ -
To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
→ -
If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness
→ -
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
→ -
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.
→ -
It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
→