— Crime and Punishment (1866), Part 3, Chapter 1
About this quote
हिन्दी में
अपनी राह पर भटक जाना, किसी और की राह पर सही निकलने से बेहतर है।
What it means
The sentence is comparative, and it concedes the hard part in advance: it assumes you will go wrong. It never claims your own way produces the better outcome. The entire weight sits on the word own — on who the result belongs to, not on which result is correct.
It is worth keeping because it explains why borrowed correctness decays. An error you made yourself carries information about how you made it, and that is something you can act on next time. A right answer taken from someone else teaches nothing once conditions shift, because you never learned which question it was answering.
What it teaches you
When you adopt a method because a book or a senior colleague endorsed it, find out what problem it was built to solve before you keep applying it — if you cannot state that problem, you are carrying someone else’s answer to a question you have not checked is yours. And when something you decided yourself fails, spend the time on where the reasoning bent rather than on replacing it with a rule.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पंक्ति यह दावा नहीं करती कि अपना रास्ता बेहतर नतीजा देगा — वह तो मान ही लेती है कि गलती होगी। असली बात ‘अपना’ शब्द में है: अपनी गलती से पता चलता है कि सोच कहाँ चूकी, जबकि उधार लिया हुआ सही उत्तर परिस्थिति बदलते ही बेकार हो जाता है। सीख: कोई तरीका अपनाएँ तो जानिए कि वह किस समस्या का हल था, वरना आप किसी और के प्रश्न का उत्तर ढो रहे हैं।
Where it comes from
Razumihin’s outburst, defending human error against systems that promise to eliminate it. It is one of the warmest passages in a cold book.
The line is usually quoted as encouragement to be original. In context it is narrower and better: a defence of the right to make your own mistakes rather than inherit someone else’s correctness.
