I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.

It's the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery.

Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?" Marmeladov's question came suddenly into his mind "for every man must have somewhere to turn.

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?