Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system."

"The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul."

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?

"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of things left unsaid."

Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent.

I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.  I think my liver hurts.  However, i don't know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me.  I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine.  What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine.

What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.

FD suffered epletic "fits" (as they were known then). In 'The Idiot', he writes of his experience in the third person.

"He remembered that he always had one minute just before the epleptic fit when suddenly in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light in his brain, and with extraordinary impetus all his vital forces suddenly began working at their highest tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self,  were multiplied ten times at these moments which passed like a flash of lightning. His mind and heart were flooded with extraordinary light... But these moments, these flashes, were only the prelude of that final second in which the fit began."

FD went on to say that regardless of the "abnormalcy" of his disease that those moments were of "the highest form of existence" and "the acme of harmony and beauty". He concludes with a Rumiesque phrase.

"at the very last conscious moment before the fit began, he had time to say to himself clearly and consciously, "Yes, for this moment one might give one's whole life!"

In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. 

Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.