Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

253 Sourced Quotes

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it-which is what matters most.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.

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

Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature... and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you can put the question, Am I or am I not responsible for my acts then you are responsible.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When… in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

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

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

I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The most offensive is not their lying—one can always forgive lying—lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth—what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying…

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

'But,' I [Dmitri Karamazov] asked, 'how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?' 'Didn't you know?' he said. And he laughed. 'Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,' he said.

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

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. 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? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream — oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!

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

... people only count their misfortunes; their good luck they take no account of. But if they were to take everything into account, as they should, they'd find that they had their fair share of it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible punishment so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

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

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

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