Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

253 Sourced Quotes

Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to 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
Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If I seem happy to you... You could never say anything that would please me more. For men are made for happiness, and anyone who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.' All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.

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
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. 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, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And now once again I asked myself the question: do I love her? And once more I could not answer, that is to say, again, for the hundreth time, I answered that I hated her.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Brother, I'm not depressed and haven't lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter – this is what life is, herein lies its task.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.

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
They have their Hamlets, but we still have our Karamazovs!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
They had no temples, but they had a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they talked to one another.

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
It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who every one was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was...

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
Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. 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 eveyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.

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
Petersburg, the most abstract and premeditated city on earth.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it.

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
It was evident that he revived by fits and starts. He would suddenly come to himself from actual delirium for a few minutes; he would remember and talk with complete consciousness, chiefly in disconnected phrases which he had perhaps thought out and learnt by heart in the long weary hours of his illness, in his bed, in sleepless solitude.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky