Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses faith in the existence of hope and light, even in darkness.
Dostoevsky suggests that the awareness of something positive, like the sun, exists even when we cannot perceive it directly. This represents a deeper understanding of life, where hope and purpose persist despite challenges or hardships.
Themes
HopeFaithExistenceLightLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a graduation speech, to inspire students facing uncertain futures.
More from Fyodor Dostoevsky
All quotes βWhat if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it's for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.
Fyodor DostoevskyRead
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I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
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There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
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I have a really interesting political point of view, and its not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you cant go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You cant. I wouldnt wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.
Robert Downey, Jr.Read
Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
Victor HugoRead
Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is always more or less true.
Joseph De MaistreRead