Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

253 Sourced Quotes

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

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
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I've made a terrible confession to you, he concluded gloomily. Do appreciate it, gentlemen. And it's not enough, not enough to appreciate it, you must not just appreciate it, it should also be precious to you, and if not, if this, too, goes past your souls, then it means you really do not respect me, gentlemen. I tell you that, and I will die of shame at having confessed to such men as you.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

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 have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.

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 am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And what is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I'd say, is to develop in man a capacity to feel a greater variety of sensations. And nothing, absolutely nothing else. And through this development, man will yet learn how to enjoy bloodshed. Why, it has already happened.... Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.

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
Everything is in a man's own hands, and if he lets everything slip through his fingers, it is through sheer cowardice. That's an axiom.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.

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
In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded, and it benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement.

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
I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

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
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
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
A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky