Adam

“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 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“You keep laughing, and very inappropriately, if I may say so. You don't understand anything! There are no such roles in a commune. Communes are set up precisely so that there will be no such roles. In a commune, the present essence of this role will be entirely changed, and what is stupid here will become intelligent there, what is unnatural here, under the present circumstances, will there become perfectly natural. Everything depends on what circumstances and what environment man lives in. Environment is everything, and man himself is nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Young man, that there is such a thing as prosperity or, as they now say, progress, if only in the name of science and economic truth...

A common place!

No, it is not a common place, sir! If up to now, for example I have been told to love my neighbor, and I did love him, what came of it? What came of it was that I tore my caftan in two, shared it with my neighbor, and we were both left half naked, as the Russian proverb says: if you chase several hares at once, you won't catch any of them. But science says: love yourself before all, because everything in the world is based on self-interest. If you love only yourself, you will set your affairs up properly, and your caftan will also remain in one piece. And economic truth adds that the more properly arranged personal affairs and, so to speak, whole caftans there are in society, the firmer its foundations are and the better arranged its common cause. It follows that by acquiring solely and exclusively for myself, I am thereby precisely acquiring for everyone, as it were, and working so that my neighbor will have something more than a torn caftan, not from private, isolated generosities now, but as a result of universal prosperity. A simple though, which unfortunately has been too long in coming, overshadowed by rapturousness and dreaminess, though it seems it would not take much wit to realize...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Everything depends on what circumstances and what environment man lives in. Environment is everything, and man himself is nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment