Top 100 Quotes About Dostoevsky
#1. 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
#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. How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#6. I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#10. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#11. Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long, tumultuous stretches;
look what intensity did to poor Van Gogh!
John Tagliabue
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.
Georg Brandes
#29. My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.
Stefan Zweig
#34. I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus ...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#36. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Phil Klay
#37. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#38. If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#39. Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. What is hell? ... The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#45. 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
#47. 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
#49. 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
#50. Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#52. In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#53. Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#55. Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#69. What you need more than anything in life is a definite position.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#70. 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
#71. 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,
#72. Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. A young man sits in one.
Bruce Robinson
#73. The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#75. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#80. 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
#81. Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#83. As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#84. He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.
Richard Brautigan
#88. Back when George W. Bush was identifying his Axis of Evil, it struck me that a longer and more instructive list could be compiled of the Axis of the Humiliated (or Insulted and Injured, to borrow from Dostoevsky).
Serge Schmemann
#89. 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
#90. And in fact I've noticed that faith always seems to be less in the daytime
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#92. How were you supposed to feel when you adored the novels of Jules Verne, Maupassant, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Simenon and loads of others who then turned out to be complete bastards?
Jean-Michel Guenassia
#93. So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#94. There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#95. In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#96. Something was not dead within me, in the depths of my heart and conscience it would not die, and it showed itself in acute depression.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#97. Yes, that's right ... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#98. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#99. If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#100. You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman ...
'You never can tell ... ' he answered.
'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!
Mikhail Bulgakov
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