Saturday 2 March 2013

The second half of a man's life

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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.

5 comments:

  1. I think Dostoevsky had a lot of children. Oh I really can't recall. I,ll look it up.

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  2. I 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.

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  3. http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/studentpapers/Children.shtml

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  4. I 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.

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  5. Thanks for -Middlebury,Beyer-.I visited and will again. It's good.

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