Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot (1869)

19 Sourced Quotes

View all Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes
We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

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
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
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
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
Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It's easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.

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

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I have never in my life met a man like him for noble simplicity, and boundless truthfulness. I understood from the way he talked that anyone who chose could deceive him, and that he would forgive anyone afterwards who had deceived him, and that was why I grew to love him.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I consider you the most honest and truthful of men, more honest and truthful than anyone; and if they say that your mind... that is, that you're sometimes afflicted in your mind, it's unjust. I made up my mind about that, and disputed with others, because, though you really are mentally afflicted (you won't be angry with that, of course; I'm speaking from a higher point of view), yet the mind that matters is better in you than in any of them. It's something, in fact, they have never dreamed of. For there are two sorts of mind: one that matters, and one that doesn't matter.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we're both unhappy, and we both suffer.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky