Best quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian philosopher, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and journalist. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in both Russian and world literature, and many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. Dostoevsky’s literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes.

His most acclaimed novels include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His Notes from Underground, a novella published in 1864, is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature. Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends and through books by Russian and foreign authors.

His mother died in 1837, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayevsky Engineering Academy. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s, he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into Saint Petersburg’s literary circles. However, he was arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group, the Petrashevsky Circle, that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia.

Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian hard labour camp, which inspired him to write The House of the Dead (1860-1862). Aside from the labour camp, there also followed six years of compulsory military service in exile. In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer’s Diary, a collection of his writings.

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He began to travel around Western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers. Dostoevsky’s body of work consists of thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, and numerous other works.

His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia, influencing an equally great number of later writers, including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, the philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the emergence of existentialism and Freudianism. Friedrich Nietzsche called him “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn” in Twilight of the Idols. His books have been translated into over 170 languages.

Some of the best quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky are listed below.

“A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A dead man has no age.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A fool is always pleased with what he says, and, besides, he always says more than he needs to.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it – that is what you must do.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that’s what you must do.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions – it’s like a dream.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“After all, bluff and real emotion exist so easily side by side.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Alyosha exclaimed. “I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world.” “Love life more than its meaning?” “Certainly, love it before logic, as you say, certainly before logic, and only then will I also understand its meaning.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And do you know, Sonia, that low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And if there’s love, you can do without happiness too. Even with sorrow, life is sweet.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And you’re sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes – you’re sorry, for you didn’t even have time to fall in love…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better – cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. “I am alone and they are everyone,” I thought–and pondered.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“As a Russian proverb has it, ‘Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Be the sun and all will see you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Beauty will save the world.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the ‘wee ones,’ because there are little children and big children. All people are ‘wee ones.’ And I’ll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Because I’m a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Being in love doesn’t mean loving.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labour. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Every one can love occasionally, even the wicked can.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But how could you live and have no story to tell?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Compassion was the principal and, perhaps, the only law of existence for the whole of mankind.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Do you know I’ve been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced, in fact, that everything is disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment – still I should want to live and, having once tried of the cup, I would not turn from it until I have drained it!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Does the fellow want his head smashed?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Don’t be like everyone else, even if you are the only one.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Don’t quarrel with your bread and butter.” “They.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Don’t think I’m talking nonsense because I’m drunk. I’m not a bit drunk. Brandy’s all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Everyone thinks of himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive himself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Everything passes, only truth remains.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Everything seems stupid when it fails.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering. I believe really great men must experience great sadness in the world.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For if there’s no everlasting God, there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For the secret of human existence lies not only in living, but in knowing what to live for.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is precious.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live. That’s the goal for everyone.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“God is the pain of the fear of death.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“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?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Hang your merit. I don’t seek anyone’s approbation.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He could not endure without mortification, without resentment even, that the holiest of holy men should have been exposed to the jeering and spiteful mockery of the frivolous crowd so inferior to him.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He said that those five minutes seemed to him an infinite length of time, an immense richness; it seemed to him that during those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point in thinking about the last moment yet, so he made various allocations: he calculated the time he needed to say goodbye to his companions, and allotted some two minutes to it, then he allotted another two minutes to think about himself for the last time, and then look around him for the last time. He.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He who masters the grey everyday is a hero.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“He’s an intelligent man, but it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Hell is the inability to love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow – they don’t hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“His wife, however, happened to be the only woman in his life who failed totally to arouse any passion in him whatsoever.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Hold your tongue; you won’t understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Humanity can live without science, it can live without bread, but it cannot live without beauty. Without beauty, there would be nothing left to do in this life. Here the secret lies. Here lies the entire story.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am a sick man… I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am too young and I’ve loved you too much.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there – that is living.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I do not wish you much happiness – it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people’s philosophy, I will simply repeat: ‘Live more’ and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last November on the third of November, to be precise and I remember every instant since.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I have a plan-to go mad.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it in my mind. I have seen it, SEEN IT and the living image of it has filled my soul forever…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I know that you don’t believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I swear to you, sirs, that excessive consciousness is a disease – a genuine, absolute disease.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness – a real thorough-going illness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies – I exist. I’m tormented on the rack – but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar – I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be grander and richer – and then it struck me that life may be grand enough even in a prison.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I utter what you would not dare think.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I want to suffer so that I may love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I wanted to tell you of a longing I have. I should like some one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and go away. I don’t want to be happy.” “You are in love with disorder?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I worship her, Alyosha, worship her. Only she doesn’t see it. No, she still thinks I don’t love her enough. And she tortures me, tortures me with her love. The past was nothing! In the past it was only that infernal body of hers that tortured me, but now I’ve taken all her soul into my soul and through her I’ve become a man. Will they marry us? If they don’t I will die of jealousy. I imagine something every day…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I’m a master of speaking silently – all my life I’ve spoken silently and I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I’m drunk but truthful.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I’m sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I’ve always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I’ve been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I’ve looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I’ve always wanted all or nothing!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I’ve never been a coward at heart, although I’ve always been a coward in action;.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If everything on earth were rational, nothing would happen.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If God is dead, everything is allowed.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If he’s alive he has everything in his power! Whose fault is it he doesn’t understand that.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s human, he’ll murder; if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If not reason, then the devil.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If the person laughs well, they are a good person.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If there is no God, then I am God.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“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. if I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your sins but the sins of others.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If you can put the question, ‘Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?’ then you are responsible.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In a way there’s only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In fact, we have lost touch so badly that we often feel a kind of loathing for genuine ‘living live,’ and hence cannot endure being reminded of it. We’ve reached a point where we virtually regard ‘living life’ as hard labor, almost servitude and we all agree in private that it’s much better ’according to books.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In short, one may say anything about the history of the world – anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilt for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“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.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself – as though that were so necessary – that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is man’s unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them – the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn’t help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It was a sad and dismal day today, rainy, without a ray of hope, just like the long days of my old age which I know will be as sad and dismal.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s difficult to judge beauty; I am not ready yet. Beauty is a riddle.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It’s the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“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 Dostoyevsky
“Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Lamentations ease the heart only by straining and exacerbating it more and more. Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Latterly he tormented me, too: it was all quite natural, human beings are created in order to torment one another.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Let us be servants in order to be leaders.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Life had stepped into the place of theory.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Life is in ourselves and not in the external.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Life is what matters, life alone – the continuous, eternal process of discovering life – and not the discovery itself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Look how our young people commit suicide, without asking themselves Hamlet’s question what there is beyond, without a sign of such a question, as though all that relates to the soul and to what awaits us beyond the grave had long been erased in their minds and buried under the sands.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go, and do not be afraid.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love life more than the meaning of it?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don’t trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Luxuries are easy to take up but very difficult to give up.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Lying is a delightful thing for it leads to the truth.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Make us your slaves, but feed us.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is bound to lie about himself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering…” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. If anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. It’s only that.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you – alas, it is true of almost every one of us!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you – and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“May you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Money is coined liberty.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it’s absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My friends, God is necessary for me if only because he is the one being who can be loved eternally.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“No matter. He is holy. He carries in his heart the secret of renewal for all: that power which will, at last, establish truth on the earth, and all men will be holy and love one another, and there will be no more rich nor poor, no exalted nor humbled, but all will be as the children of God, and the true Kingdom of Christ will come.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“No, evidently habit means a lot. The devil knows what habit can do to a person.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“No, life is only given to me once and I shall never have it again; I don’t want to wait for ‘the happiness of all.’ I want to live myself, or else better not live at all.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Now I’m living out my life in a corner, trying to console myself with the stupid, useless excuse that an intelligent man cannot turn himself into anything, that only a fool can make anything he wants out of himself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God’s help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Oh I’ve plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“One can fall in love and still hate.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“One can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan’t understand them thoroughly.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“One cannot love what one does not know.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“One man doesn’t believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Only through suffering can we find ourselves.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“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 Dostoyevsky
“Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Realists do not fear the results of their study.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Reality is a thing of infinite diversity, and defies the most ingenious deductions and definitions of abstract thought, nay, abhors the clear and precise classifications in which we so delight. Reality tends to infinite subdivision of things, and truth is a matter of infinite shadings and differentiations.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Reason is the slave of passion.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognises that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Right attitudes produces right action.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Roman Catholicism was not Christianity; you asserted that Rome proclaimed Christ subject to the third temptation of the devil. Announcing to all the world that Christ without an earthly kingdom cannot hold his ground upon earth, Catholicism by so doing proclaimed Antichrist and ruined the whole Western world.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the PRIVACY of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s souls out of their solitude and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Speak of a wolf and you see his tail!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men I think, must feel great sorrow in this world.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Suffering, too, is a good thing. Suffer!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Talk nonsense to me, by all means, but do it with your own brain, and I shall love you for it. To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that is someone else’s; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“That’s just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating – and then he eats you up.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The chief thing is to love others likeyourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted – you will find out at once how to arrange it all.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The consciousness of life is higher than life.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The convict is greedy for money, to the point of madness, and if he throws it away he does so in order to procure what he values far above money – liberty, or at least semblance of liberty.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The first thing is to lower the level of education, science and accomplishment.1 A high level of science and accomplishment is accessible only to people of high ability, and there’s no need for high ability! People of high ability have always seized power and been despots. People of high ability can’t help but be despots and have always corrupted more than they have brought benefit; they are sent into exile or executed.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The meaning is, that you all bore me to tears and I’d like to be left alone,′ Raskolnikov answered calmly.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was ’sublime and beautiful,’the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The Russian soul is a dark place.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The soul is healed by being with children.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The whole question here is: am I a monster, or a victim myself?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“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.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The world will be saved by beauty.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There are strange friendships: two friends almost want to devour each other, and they spend their entire lives living that way, but meanwhile they cannot part.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There are strange friendships: two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is a crack in my soul, and I can hear it trembling, quivering, stirring deep inside me.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is among the people a silent, long-suffering grief; it withdraws into itself and is silent.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men’s sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There’s the Holy Ghost and there’s the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can appear as other birds- sometimes as a swallow, sometimes a goldfinch and sometimes as a blue-tit.” “How do you know him from an ordinary tit?” “He speaks.” “How does he speak, in what language?” “Human language.” “And what does he tell you?” “Why, to-day he told me that a fool would visit me and would ask me unseemly questions. You.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“They were like two enemies in love with one another.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“This life you cry up so much is what I wanted to extinguish by suicide, whereas my dream, my dream – oh, it has revealed to me a great, new, regenerated intensity of life!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them. The.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable, but desirable. They mean growth. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To confess one’s guilt and one’s original sin is little, very little; one must wean oneself away from them completely. And that takes more than a little time.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To cook your hare you must first catch it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To her, and to father! Whew! A coincidence! Why was I calling you, wishing for you, why was I longing and thirsting for you with every curve of my soul and even with my ribs? Because I wanted to send you precisely to father, and then to her as well, to Katerina Ivanovna, to have done with her and with father. To send an angel. I could have sent anybody, but I need to send an angel. And here you are going to her and father yourself.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To live without Hope is to Cease to live.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“To think too much is a disease.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: “Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky”
“Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Truth with love is a lie.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man’s free will?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Tyranny is a habit which may be developed until at last it becomes a disease. I declare that the noblest nature can become so hardened and bestial that nothing distinguishes it from that of a wild animal. Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We are all happy if we but knew it.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We are citizens of eternity.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Wealth is the number of things one can do without.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Well, let them talk nonsense: perhaps then they’ll talk sense later.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“What is honour, my dear, when you have nothing to eat?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“When reason fails, the devil helps!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“When reason fails, the devil helps!” he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Which is better a cheap happiness or lofty suffering? Tell me then, which is better?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Who doesn’t desire his fathers death?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Whoever steps on the lowest step will surely step on the highest.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“With love one can live even without happiness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Without God all things are permitted.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Woe to the man who offends a small child!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Words are not deeds.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Yes, universal history! It’s the study of the successive follies of mankind and nothing more.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You are very beautiful, Aglaya Ivanovna, so beautiful that one is afraid to look at you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You began with a lie, what began with a lie was bound to also end with a lie. That is a law of nature.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You believe in the crystal palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you can never stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture, even with your fist hidden away. Well, perhaps I’m so afraid of this building precisely because it’s made of crystal and it’s eternally indestructible, and because it won’t be possible to stick one’s tongue out even furtively.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You can be sincere and still be stupid.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You can’t be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You have only to creep into a secluded corner or into a crocodile, to shut your eyes, and you immediately devise a perfect millennium for mankind.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid – and I know they are – yet I won’t be wiser?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You see, Rodya, to my thinking, the great thing for getting on in the world is always to keep to the seasons; if you don’t insist on having asparagus in January, you keep your money in your purse!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Tags: Quotes