Top 100 Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
#1. How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#2. I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#3. I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings of what? Of the truth , for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes , have seen it in all its glory .
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#4. Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#5. 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 Dostoevsky
#7. I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#8. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#10. I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#11. When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness, ... then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift ... every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#12. Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#15. 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 Dostoevsky
#18. Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#19. I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#20. But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#21. Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#22. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#23. Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery ... The great thing about it is equality ... Slaves are bound to be equal.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#26. What you need more than anything in life is a definite position.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#27. It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#28. I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#29. Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#30. Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#33. In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#34. Yes, that's right ... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#35. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#36. People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#38. That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#42. To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#44. Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#45. To love another person is to see them as God intended them to be.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#46. Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#47. But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#48. A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#49. My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#50. If you can put the question, 'Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?' then you are responsible.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#51. I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#52. Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#53. Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#54. To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#55. Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#56. To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#57. The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#58. All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#60. On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#61. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#62. We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#63. If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#64. It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#65. Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#66. There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#68. The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#70. A single day is sufficient for a man to discover what happiness is.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#71. At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#72. Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#73. I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#75. The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#76. The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#77. Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#78. 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 Dostoevsky
#79. The sky was horribly dark , but one could distinctly see tattered clouds , and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star , and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea : I decided to kill myself that night .
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#82. An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#83. There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#86. Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#87. It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them - the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#88. The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#91. Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#92. There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery and authority.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#93. To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#94. Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance ... Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do ... It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#95. It's in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#96. If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#97. Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#98. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#99. Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#100. Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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