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But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)

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More quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

The Idiot (1868)

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.

Notes from Underground (1864)

If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love.

The Brothers Karamazov (1879)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.