It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in full Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction.
Occupation:
writer, philosopher
Born:
11/11/21
Died:
02/09/81 (59)
Films (Writer):
'I think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.'
'Love life more than the meaning of it?'
'Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will I grasp its meaning. That's what I've been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved.'
From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse, a hundred suspicions don’t make a proof, as the English proverb says, but that’s only from the rational point of view—you can’t help being partial, for after all a lawyer is only human.
I love mankind, but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.
I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies — I exist. I'm tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.