Someone posted this on Facebook, which stopped me in my tracks, from Fyodor Dostoevsky:
The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.Oh no.
So there is no hope?
I looked up on the net to see whether he said anything else as good and found another quotation from him, less arresting but very true:
If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
This is profoundly true and profoundly comforting:
Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.
Here are some more:
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
The soul is healed by being with children.
It's life that matters, nothing but life - the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.
I think Dostoevsky had a lot of children. Oh I really can't recall. I,ll look it up.
ReplyDeleteI really must read more of him and about him. I read much till 23 then very little. Writers with religious faith are so much more interesting than those without, I find.
ReplyDeletehttp://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/studentpapers/Children.shtml
ReplyDeleteI do agree that they are very more interesting.I've too thought of revisiting him and now I will. And I was wrong that he had many children;just four. I must have been thinking of Tolstoy.
ReplyDeleteThanks for -Middlebury,Beyer-.I visited and will again. It's good.
ReplyDelete