Top 100 Dostoevsky's Quotes
#1. It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible ... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.
Brian D. McLaren
#2. I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.
Isaac Hempstead-Wright
#3. But the Russian writers would be packed away in mothballs and stored in our basement. I would savor the idea of Dostoevsky's, Tolstoy's and Gorki's volumes molding in the dank cellar, wisps of camphor and odors of wet earth floating above them. I
Maya Angelou
#4. Dostoevsky's hero is not an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice; we do not see him, we hear him;
Mikhail Bakhtin
#5. The fundamental category in Dostoevsky's mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#6. That accents of the hero's self-consciousness are really objectified and that the work itself observes a distance between the hero and the author. If the umbilical cord uniting the hero to his creator is not cut, then what we have is not a work of art but a personal document. Dostoevsky's
Mikhail Bakhtin
#7. You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!
Mikhail Bulgakov
#8. In fact, whenever I read something as complicated as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and think about his having written it in longhand, I am not merely awed - the thought gives me a headache.
Thomas B. Sawyer
#9. Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor.
Lev Shestov
#10. My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.
Janet Fitch
#11. Dostoevsky's hero is not only a discourse about himself and his immediate environment, but also a discourse about the world; he is not only cognizant, but an ideologist as well. The
Mikhail Bakhtin
#12. The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.
George Steiner
#13. In none of Dostoevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit; in fact there is no evolution, no growth in general,
Mikhail Bakhtin
#14. Innocence is a pretty dangerous thing, you know. Revisit Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' or, for that matter, Greene's 'The Quiet American' to find out how destructive it can be.
Neel Mukherjee
#15. Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#16. Dostoevsky, like Goethe's Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him. A
Mikhail Bakhtin
#17. I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#18. 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
#19. No, no, I'm a lowbrow. I read [Dostoevsky] more out of obligation than enjoyment. For enjoyment, for me, it's a beer and the football game.
Woody Allen
#20. 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
#21. I was a nut for Dostoevsky. You can tell a lot from what people read between those ages. My brother was a Steinbeck freak and now he lives in a little village in New Hampshire and he's a baker.
Vincent Kartheiser
#22. If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
Tom Hodgkinson
#23. For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.
John Carroll
#24. 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
#25. I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.
Richard Lewis
#26. 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
#27. And it has always been a mystery, and I've marveled a thousand times at this ability of man (and, it seems, of the Russian man above all) to cherish the highest ideal in his soul alongside the greatest baseness, and all that in perfect sincerity.
The Adolescent (or, The Raw Youth)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#28. Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#30. Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#31. In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#33. Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#34. 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
#36. It's in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#37. The degree of a nation's civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#38. " You think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth." --Crime and punishment, F. Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#39. All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most ... .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#40. One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#41. 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
#42. The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.
Svetlana Alexievich
#43. When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?
George Steiner
#44. I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist.
Will Self
#45. You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Richard Flanagan
#46. I do not wish you much happiness
it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people's philosophy, I will simply repeat: 'Live more' and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#47. Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was ardently persuaded of Christ's divinity, but that divinity moved his soul and solicited his intelligence most forcefully through its human aspect.
George Steiner
#49. That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#50. 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
#51. Yes, that's right ... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#52. Let us first fulfill Christ's injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#53. 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
#54. In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev
Ernest Hemingway,
#55. Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
David Foster Wallace
#56. What you need more than anything in life is a definite position.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#58. This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#59. 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
#61. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#62. 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
#63. It is a pity that there was no Dostoevsky living near this most interesting decadent [Jesus], I mean someone with an eye for the distinctive charm that this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness, and childishness has to offer.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#64. I'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky.
Michel Houellebecq
#66. Only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long, tumultuous stretches;
look what intensity did to poor Van Gogh!
John Tagliabue
#67. 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
#68. Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#69. 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
#70. Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#71. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#72. In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#73. 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
#74. When I was having my hair and make-up done backstage at a fashion show, I would sneak in a copy of Dostoevsky and read it inside a copy of Elle or Vogue. But it would be pretentious of me to say I was more intelligent than the other supermodels.
Carla Bruni
#75. I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#78. How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#79. Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#81. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, ... perhaps better than we actually are.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#82. What is hell? ... The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#83. The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
Albert Camus
#84. He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#85. Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#86. The fact is I don't lead a simple enough inner life. I indulge in excesses, bacchanalia of the spirit. Perhaps I identify too much with everything I read and study. Someone like Dostoevsky still shatters me.
Etty Hillesum
#87. Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#88. If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#89. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#90. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Phil Klay
#92. I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus ...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#94. Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.
Stefan Zweig
#95. We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party ... Art ... is less like a cocktail party thank a tank of shark.
John Gardner
#96. In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall ...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#97. My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#98. Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.
Georg Brandes
#99. 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 Dostoevsky
#100. The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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