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May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Found below in my comments to this post are more quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Feel free to vote up the quotes in the comments that you like the most. Vote them all up if you like them equally :)
Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.
Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?...No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people's expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it--you'll find that a bit harder.
For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms. I’ve already mentioned this above. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow minded. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought.
The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!
Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness.
إنَّ جوهرَ العاطفة الدينية مستقلٌ عنْ جميعِ البراهين، وجميعِ الأفعالِ السيّئة وجميعِ الجرائمِ وجميعِ مذاهبِ الإلحاد. إنَّ في هذهِ العاطفة شيئًا لا يمكنُ أنْ تنالهُ أدلّةُ الملحدين في يومٍ مِنَ الأيام. وسيظلُّ الأمرُ على هذا النحوِ أبدَ الدّّهْر.
I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!
هذهِ الملاحظة التي ذكرتها أنتَ الآن تَخطرُ ببالِ كلَّ إنسان. ولتحقيقِ هذهِ الغاية إنما اخترعوا تلكَ الآلة، أعني
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3137322.Fyodor_Dostoyevsky?page=21
مِنْ حُسنِ الحظ، على الأقل، أنَّ الإنسانَ لا يتألمُ مدةً طويلةً حينَ يُقْطَعُ رأسه.