Top 100 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes
#1. Thus a man will sometimes suffer half an hour of mortal fear with a robber, but once the knife is finally at his throat, even fear vanishes.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#2. I don't understand it either. Obscure and vague, but intelligent. 'Everybody writes like that now,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#3. But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#4. People of the middle sort like us, thinking people that is, are always tongue-tied and awkward. What is the reason of it? Whether it is the lack of public interest, or whether it is we are so honest we don't want to deceive one another.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#5. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should be begging to be under control again at once.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#7. A fool is always pleased with what he says, and, besides, he always says more than he needs to.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#8. Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop in these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitration.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#9. She thinks she can overcome everything, that everything will give way to her.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#10. Through the inscrutable decrees of Providence everything has its recompense, and a visible calamity sometimes brings with it a great, if invisible, profit.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#11. he made a point of never asserting himself when he would gain more by keeping in the background;
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#13. 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
#14. The brutes imagine they are doing me an honour in letting me sit down with them. They don't understand that it's an honour to them not to me!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#15. Oh, Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy. I sometimes imagine God only knows what, that everyone is laughing at me, the entire world, and at such moments, at such moments I am quiet simply ready to annihilate the entire order of things.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#16. But she forgot nothing, and he sometimes forgot much too quickly, and, often that same day, encouraged by her composure, would laugh and frolic over the champagne, if friends stopped by. What venom must have been in her eyes at those moments yet he noticed nothing!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#17. When I am upstairs in my little garret I have only to remember and imagine the rustle of your dress, and I am ready to bite off my hands.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#18. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays & the soft tender gentle memories that come with them ... '
-Father Zossima
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#19. Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill,
every bee knows the formula of its beehive.
They know it in their own way, not in our way.
Only humankind does not know its own formula.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#20. What did it mean, falling at his feet like that? Was it symbolic or what?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#21. Oh, I have always been proud, I always wanted all or nothing! You see it was just because I am not one who will accept half a happiness, but always wanted all
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#22. Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#23. If Stavrogin believes, he does not believe that he believes. And if he does not believe, he does not believe that he does not believe.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#25. Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#26. Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#28. Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#29. He seemed to be very dark-haired, lean, and swarthy; his eyes were large, undoubtedly black, very shiny, and had a yellow cast, like a Gypsy's - that could be guessed even in the dark. He must have been about forty, and was not drunk.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#30. Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#32. Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#33. One circumstance tormented me then: Namely, that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am only one, and they are all.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#35. I've already warned you that the simplest ideas are the hardest to understand; I'll now add that they are also the hardest to explain.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#36. At the time I was only twenty-four. My life was even then gloomy, ill-regulated, and as solitary as that of a savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking, and buried myself more and more in my hole.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#38. Man's nature acts as one whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or unconscious.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#40. An elder was one who took your soul, your will, into his soul and his will. When you choose an elder, you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete self-abnegation just like some Muslims who conseiders their sheikh as holy, some christians worship their (elder)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#41. Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live. That's the goal for everyone.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#44. Because I couldn't bear my burden and have come to throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And can you love such a mean wretch?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#46. There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#47. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#48. You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#49. Is it not enough that I am devoured, without my being expected to bless the power that devours me?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#50. They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#51. Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they're God's angels, but together, especially
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#52. Take a soldier and put him right in front of a cannon in a battle and fire it at him, and he'll go on hoping, but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier, and he'll go mad, or start to weep.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#53. With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered ... . What matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them a clue
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#54. It's curious and ridiculous how much the gaze of a prudish and painfully chaste man touched by love can sometimes express and that precisely at a moment when the man would of course sooner be glad to fall through the earth than to express anything with a word or a look.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#56. Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#57. And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#59. I don't even know what I'm writing, I have no idea, I don't know anything, and I'm not reading over it, and I'm not correcting my style, and I'm writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you ... My precious, my darling, my dearest!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#61. You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don't even believe in virtue--that's what makes you angry and torments you, that's why you're so vindictive.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#62. If she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me
even then I would have jumped!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#63. In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#64. The novel is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt and reason, offering a complex narrative steeped with ethical debates of God, free will and morality. Since
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#65. Don't be afraid of life. How good life is when one does somethings good and just.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#66. It was natural enough that a warm, open, simple-hearted, honest giant like Razumihin, who had never seen any one like her and was not quite sober at the time, should lose his head immediately
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#67. 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
#68. Because what is man without his volition but a stop on a barrel-organ cylinder?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#69. But when he know that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all, for all human sins, the world's and each person's, only then will the goal of our unity be achieved.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#70. people do get carried away and make mistakes, but one must have indulgence; those mistakes are merely evidence of enthusiasm for the cause and of abnormal external environment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#71. Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#72. I don't understand anything ... and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact ... If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I've made up my mind to stick to the fact.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#73. We invent casuistical arguments for ourselves, we take a lesson from the Jesuits, and, for a time, contrive to allay our own doubts and convince ourselves that what we are doing is necessary, absolutely necessary, in a good cause. That is the way we are made; it is all as clear as daylight.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#74. And indeed, here I am posing an idle question of my own now: which is better - cheap happiness or sublime suffering?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#75. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks How strong I am now and how secure and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#76. Yet as the evening of Sunday came on, a sadness as of death would overtake me, for at nine o'clock I had to return to school, where everything was cold and strange and severe - where the governesses, on Mondays, lost their tempers, and nipped my ears, and made me cry.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#77. Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#78. But if you are convinced that one mustn't listen at doors, but one may murder old women at one's pleasure, you'd better be off to America and make haste. Run, young man! There may still be time. I'm speaking sincerely. Haven't you the money? I'll give you the fare.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#79. I hated them horribly, though perhaps I was worse than any of them. They repaid me in the same way, and did not conceal their aversion for me. But by then I did not desire their affection: on the contrary, I continually longed for their humiliation.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#82. It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#84. If you sin yourself and grieve even unto death for your sins or for your sudden sin, then rejoice for others, rejoice for the righteous man, rejoice that if you have sinned, he is righteous and has not sinned.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#85. it is said 'thou shalt not kill,' is he to be killed because he murdered some one else? No, it is not right, it's an impossible theory. I
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#88. Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and be not consoled, but weep.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#89. The torments of a proud decision, a deep conscience! God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#90. For why is gambling a whit worse than any other method of acquiring money? How, for instance, is it worse than trade? True, out of a hundred persons, only one can win; yet what business is that of yours or of mine?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#91. What's more, any memoirs by eyewitnesses are a treasure, no matter who the eyewitness happens to be. Don't you think so?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#92. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#93. One can't hold one's tongue when one has a feeling, a tangible feeling
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#96. You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness. Work, work unceasingly. Remember my words, for although I shall talk with you again, not only my days but my hours are numbered.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#97. For it will come to pass that even the most corrupt of our rich men will finally be ashamed of his riches before the poor man, and the poor man, seeing his humility, will understand and yield to him in joy, and will respond with kindness to his gracious shame.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#98. But, my God!" Katerina Ivanovna suddenly cried out, clasping her hands. "And he! He could be so dishonest, so inhuman! He told
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#99. Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it's like a dream.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#100. He walked, looking about him angrily and distractedly. All his ideas now seemed to be circling round some single point, and he felt that there really was such a point, and that now, now, he was left facing that point - and for the first time, indeed, during the last two months.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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