Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Suffering Quotes

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Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!

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
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
Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.

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

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

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
Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky