The Idiot Quotes

“And are you a great fancier of the female sex, Prince? Tell me beforehand!”

“N -n-no! I ’m . . . Maybe you don’t know, but because of my inborn illness, I don’t know women at all.”

“Well, in that case,” Rogozhin exclaimed, “you come out as a holy fool, Prince, and God loves your kind!”

But another rumor he involuntarily believed and feared to the point of nightmare: he had heard for certain that Nastasya Filippovna was supposedly aware in the highest degree that Ganya was marrying only for money, that Ganya’s soul was dark, greedy, impatient, envious, and boundlessly vain, out of all proportion to anything; that, although Ganya had indeed tried passionately to win Nastasya Filippovna over before, now that the two friends had decided to exploit that passion, which had begun to be mutual, for their own advantage, and to buy Ganya by selling him Nastasya Filippovna as a lawful wife, he had begun to hate her like his own nightmare. It was as if passion and hatred strangely came together in his soul, and though, after painful hesitations, he finally consented to marry “the nasty woman,” in his soul he swore to take bitter revenge on her for it and to “give it to her” later, as he supposedly put it.

“I’m always kind, if you wish, and that is my only failing, because one should not always be kind. I’m often very angry, with these ones here, with Ivan Fyodorovich especially, but the trouble is that I’m kindest when I’m angry. Today, before you came, I was angry and pretended I didn’t and couldn’t understand anything. That happens to me—like a child.”

“He told me he was fully convinced that I was a perfect child myself, that is, fully a child, that I resembled an adult only in size and looks, but in development, soul, character, and perhaps even mind, I was not an adult, and I would stay that way even if I lived to be sixty. I laughed very much: he wasn’t right, of course, because what’s little about me? But one thing is true, that I really don’t like being with adults, with people, with grown-ups—and I noticed that long ago—I don’t like it because I don’t know how.”

“Maybe I’ll be considered a child here, too—so be it! Everybody also considers me an idiot for some reason, and in fact I was once so ill that I was like an idiot; but what sort of idiot am I now, when I myself understand that I’m considered an idiot? I come in and think: ‘They consider me an idiot, but I’m intelligent all the same, and they don’t even suspect it . . .’ I often have that thought.”

“It’s clear that it made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who his lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty. It seems the poet wanted to combine in one extraordinary image the whole immense conception of the medieval chivalrous platonic love of some pure and lofty knight; naturally, it’s all an ideal.”

“Nihilists are still sometimes knowledgeable people, even learned ones, but these have gone further, ma’am, because first of all they’re practical. This is essentially a sort of consequence of nihilism, though not in a direct way, but by hearsay and indirectly, and they don’t announce themselves in some sort of little newspaper article, but directly in practice, ma’am; it’s no longer a matter, for instance, of the meaninglessness of some Pushkin or other, or, for instance, the necessity of dividing Russia up into parts; no, ma’am, it’s now considered a man’s right, if he wants something very much, not to stop at any obstacle, even if he has to do in eight persons to that end.”

“Yes, Prince, you must be given credit, you’re so good at exploiting your . . . hm, sickness (to put it decently); you managed to offer your friendship and money in such a clever form that it is now quite impossible for a noble man to accept them. It’s either all too innocent, or all too clever . . . you, however, know which.”

“Well, see how you throw a man into a final flummox! For pity’s sake, Prince: first such simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation. But excuse me, Prince, this calls for an explanation, because I . . . I’m simply confounded! Naturally, in the final end my aim was to borrow money, but you asked me about money as if you don’t find anything reprehensible in it, as if that’s how it should be?”

He is either a doctor or indeed of an extraordinary intelligence and able to guess a great many things. (But that he is ultimately an “idiot” there can be no doubt at all.)

Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily.

“I want to be brave and not afraid of anything. I don’t want to go to their balls, I want to be useful. I wanted to leave long ago. They’ve kept me bottled up for twenty years, and they all want to get me married. When I was fourteen I already thought of running away, though I was a fool. Now I have it all worked out and was waiting for you, to ask you all about life abroad.”

How did she dare write to her, he asked, wandering alone in the evening (sometimes not even remembering himself where he was walking). How could she write about that, and how could such an insane dream have been born in her head?

“You are innocent, and all your perfection is in your innocence. Oh, remember only that! What do you care about my passion for you? You are mine now, I shall be near you all my life . . . I shall die soon.”

As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own “convictions.”

“The pope seized land, an earthly throne, and took up the sword; since then everything has gone on that way, only to the sword they added lies, trickery, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, villainy; they played upon the most holy, truthful, simple-hearted, ardent feelings of the people; they traded everything, everything, for money, for base earthly power. Isn’t that the teaching of the Antichrist?! How could atheism not come out of them? Atheism came out of them, out of Roman Catholicism itself! Atheism began, before all else, with them themselves: could they believe in themselves?”

“Well, it’s no disaster! A man, too, comes to an end, and this was just a clay pot!”