Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged

And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all.

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.. Fyodor

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

The soul is healed by being with children.. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The soul is healed by being with children.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the

Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.

I worked it through with pride,I almost spoke without words, and i'm masterly at speaking without

I worked it through with pride,I almost spoke without words, and i'm masterly at speaking without words.All my life I have spoken without words, and I have passed through whole tragedies on my own account without words

Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the

Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be.

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment ... all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right

For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God's will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the

If someone proved to me that Christ
is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say

Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.

He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated

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.

Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.

originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.

It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.

My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?

We are all happy if we but knew it.

Here is a commandment for you: seek happiness in sorrow. Work, work tirelessly.

Oh, how unbearable is a happy person sometimes!

Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

Without God all things are permitted.

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.

Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.

We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.

Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.

What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?

Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today - gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon.

And indeed man has invented God. And the strange thing, the wonderful thing, is not that God really does exist, but that an idea like that - the idea of God's necessity - could find its way into the head of a savage and vicious animal such as man, so sacred is it, that idea, so touching, so exceedingly wise and so greatly to his honour.

I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!

What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be.

Peaasi on elu, ainult elu - selle lakkamatu ja lõpmatu avastamine, mitte sugugi avastus ise!

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.

For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.

It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst!

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic.

One who does not believe in God will not believe in God's people. He who believes in God's people will see His Holiness too, even though he had not believed in it till then.

. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .

Let the readers do some of the work themselves

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.

He's an intelligent man, but it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Well, you may abuse me, be angry with me if you like," Porfiry Petrovitch began again, "but I can't resist. Allow me one little question (I know I am troubling you). There is just one little notion I want to express, simply that I may not forget it.

…everyone needs a somewhere, a place he can go. There comes a time, you see, inevitably there comes a time you have to have a somewhere you can go!

...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.

Hm...yes, 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...But I am talking too much.

But the conquest of fear was what fascinated them. The continual ecstasy of vanquishing and the consciousness that no one could vanquish them was what attracted them.

The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.

Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window

Eh, brother, but nature has to be corrected and guided, otherwise we'd all drown in prejudices. Without that there wouldn't be even a single great man.

Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

Two and two do make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies.

...the laws of nature have continually all my life offended me more than anything.

I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.

For though your mind is active enough, your heart is darkened with corruption, and without a pure heart there can be no full or genuine sensibility.

Feeling my own humiliation in my heart like the sharp prick of a needle.

I was overpowered by the mere sensation of that dream and it alone survived in my sorely wounded heart.

Страдание и боль всегда обязательны для широкого сознания и глубокого сердца. Истинно

Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?

Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.

Does it matter whether it was a dream or a reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?

Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare

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.

Marriage is the moral death of every proud soul, of all independence.

But in the end I'd marry her to the one she herself loved. To a father, the man his daughter falls in love with herself always seems the worst. That's how it is.

how anxiously I yearned for those I had forsaken.

You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.

I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

Compassion is the chief law of human existence.

Be near your brothers. Not just one, but both of them.

Don't be surprised that I value prejudice, observe certain conventions, seek power-it's because I know I live in an empty society.

perchè non c'è nessun altro dal quale andare! Bisogna pure che ogni uomo abbia qualche posto dove andare. Poichè ci sono momenti in cui assolutamente bisogna andare da qualche parte!

Sono proprio i piccoli particolari, di solito, a rovinare ogni cosa...

Man is a vile creature!

Money is the honey of humanity.

Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then . . . Well, then I woke up.

How could I alone have invented it or imagined it in my dream? Could my petty heart and fickle, trivial mind have risen to such a revelation of truth?

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.

Pues nada ha sido nunca para un hombre o una sociedad humana más insoportable que la libertad.

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

It appeared to him strange and marvelous that he should have stopped in the very same place as he used to do, as if he really imagined he could think the same thoughts now as then, and be interested in the same ideas and images as had interested him once ... not long ago.

Something new and unexpected, something hitherto unknown and undreamt of, had taken place in him. He did not so much understand with his mind as feel instinctively with the full force of his emotions that he could never again communicate with these people in a great gush of feeling, as he had just now, or in any way whatever.

Quanto mais gosto da humanidade em geral, menos aprecio as pessoas em particular, como indivíduos.

In most cases, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.

Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.

Woe to the man who offends a small child!

Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.

the greater the power, the more terrible its responsibility.

But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.

إن من أسوأ وأدنأ الأشياء المتعلقة بالمال أنه قادر على شراء كل شيء حتى المواهب وستبقي هذه %

We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.

Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!

We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it.

Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted?

Man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys.

In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.

I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning...

I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.

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