The short version

[edit] Crime and Punishment (1866)


Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

"You're a gentleman," they used to say to him. "You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman."

Do a man dirt, yourself you hurt.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

If not reason, then the devil.


from Wikiquote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dostoevsky

In Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer speculates that what Dostoevsky had in mind when he defined man as a creature that gets used to everything, was the price of fine glass in Venice.