Top 100 Quotes About Dostoevsky
#1. 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. 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
#4. 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
#5. Only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long, tumultuous stretches;
look what intensity did to poor Van Gogh!
John Tagliabue
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.
Georg Brandes
#11. 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
#12. Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.
Stefan Zweig
#13. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Phil Klay
#14. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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,
#24. He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.
Richard Brautigan
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.
Sue Townsend
#32. Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.
Janet Fitch
#33. Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind.
Svetlana Alexievich
#34. Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#35. And I sit there alone with you and Dostoevsky as the real and the artificial heart continues to falter, famished ... I love you but don't know what to do.
Charles Bukowski
#36. 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
#37. Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#38. But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible.
Lev Shestov
#39. 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
#40. In Dostoevsky, two thoughts are already two people, for there are no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person. This
Mikhail Bakhtin
#41. If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.
Lev Shestov
#42. 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
#43. Dostoevsky, too, had lived a dismal and hard life. The czar sent him to a prison camp in Siberia in 1849. Dostoevsky was accused of writing socialist propaganda. He was eventually pardoned and wrote stories to ward off his creditors. Just like in the early '70s I wrote albums to ward off mine.
Bob Dylan
#44. Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
Ernest Hemingway,
#45. Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.
Albert Einstein
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.
D.H. Lawrence
#51. But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol, of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius.
Mikhail Bulgakov
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. It was not surprising that after the war Dostoevsky was linked to Kierkegaard as a prophet of social resignation.
Martin Jay
#56. 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
#57. No, the hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view on the world and on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self and his surrounding reality.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#58. 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
#59. I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Flannery O'Connor
#60. 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
#61. The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
Albert Camus
#62. Dostoevsky does not believe his own words, and he is trying to replace a lack of faith with "feeling" and eloquence.
Lev Shestov
#63. Dostoevsky's hero is not an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice; we do not see him, we hear him;
Mikhail Bakhtin
#64. 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
#65. Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
John Banville
#66. " 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
#67. The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we-here, today-cannot or do not permit ourselves.
David Foster Wallace
#68. 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
#69. How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#71. I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#72. 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
#73. In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#74. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#75. Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#76. 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
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#87. 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
#89. I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus ...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#91. If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#92. Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. What is hell? ... The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#97. 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
#100. 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
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