Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, letter, 1839
Dostoevsky's notes for a chapter of The Brothers Karamazov
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Auguste Rodin, La Danaïd, 1889
Auguste Rodin, Femme nue allongée vue de dos et en perspective
Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel study
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Insulted and the Injured
Life is in ourselves and not in the external.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, in a letter to his brother, 22 December 1849
Auguste Rodin, Untitled
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