Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

253 Sourced Quotes

In the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart — my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.

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
We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that brought them such suffering, was, at last, lifted from their hearts.

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
Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously.

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
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
Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creatures is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom […] Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?

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
Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?...No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people's expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it—you'll find that a bit harder.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth, well known to all intelligent people.

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.

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
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
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
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