My Favourite Books 📚

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Beauty will save the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present — to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigor — he was only twenty-two — and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Student

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
― Mark Twain

“It’s necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell

“He meditated on the the use to which he should devote that power of youth which is granted to man only once in a lifetime: that force which gives man a power of making himself, or even as it seemed to him – of making the universe into anything he wishes.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Then the sun peeped over the edge of the prairie and the whole world glittered. Every tiniest thing glittered rosy toward the sun and pale blue toward the sky, and all along every blade of grass ran rainbow sparkles.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelha

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelha

“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky