Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” Quotes (63 Quotes)

Clearly, he now had not to be anguished, not to suffer passively, by mere reasoning about unresolvable questions, but to do something without fail, at once, quickly.

It's the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery.

That's as it should be, they tell us. A certain percentage, they tell us, must every year go, that way, to the devil, I suppose, so that the rest may remain chaste, and not be interfered with. A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory.

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.

Don't be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don't be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.

Kto sumienie posiada, niech cierpi, skoro zda? sobie sprawe; z pomy?ki. Be;dzie mu to kara; - obok katorgi.

That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.

What's most revolting is that one is really sad! No, it's better at home. Here at least one blames others for everything and excuses oneself.

Dreams appear much more prominent and clear when the dreamer is in an unhealthy state - they have an extraordinary semblance of reality. Most monstrous pictures are put together but all the circumstances are so subtly interwoven the details so artistically harmonious in every minute respect as to defy human imitation. Such morbid dreams are always recollected for very long and produce strong impressions on the disordered and already excited organs of the dreamer.

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

The execution of the deed is sometimes masterfully done, in the most ingenious fashion, yet the control of the individual actions that comprise it, the origin of those actions, is diffuse and is associated with various morbid sensations. Rather like a dream.

When reason fails, the devil helps!

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.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid-and I know they are-yet I won't be wiser?

Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.

Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.

The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal.

A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.

Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.

My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman who brought no good to anyone, to murder whom would pardon forty sins, who sucked the lifeblood of the poor, and you call that a crime ?

The harmonious man, it needs to be said, hardly exists at all; out of many tens, even hundreds of thousands perhaps one or two at most are encountered, and even then in rather feeble versions.

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.

He is a man of intelligence, but to act sensibly, intelligence is not enough.

No, I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! Granted, granted that there is no flaw in all that reasoning, that all that I have concluded this last month is clear as day, true as arithmetic… . My God! Anyway I couldn't bring myself to it! I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! Why, why then am I still … ?

The people who have nothing to lock up are the happy ones, aren't they?

Again it became suddenly plain and perceptible to him that he had just told a fearful lie - that he would never now be able to speak freely of everything - that he would never again be able to speak of anything to anyone.

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.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

The temperament reflects everything like a mirror! Gaze into it and admire what you see! But why are you so pale, Rodion Romanovitch? Is the room stuffy? Shall I open the window?

Ah, Father! That's words and only words! Forgive! If he'd not been run over, he'd have come home today drunk and his only shirt dirty and in rags and he'd have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been sousing and rinsing till daybreak, washing his rags and the children's and then drying them by the window and as soon as it was daylight I should have been darning them. What's the use of talking forgiveness! I have forgiven as it is!

Hm … yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom

Oh, as I stood above the Neva this morning at dawn I knew I was a villian.

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

Although Pulcheria Alexandrovna was forty-three, her face still retained traces of her former beauty; she looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age. We may add in parenthesis that to preserve all this is the only means of retaining beauty to old age.

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.

And indeed, human beings in general are fond, even inordinately fond, of being trampled on, have you noticed that? But of women it's especially true. One might even say they that can't get along without it.

I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!

Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

If she'd been lame or a hunchback I'd have probably fallen in love with her even more... Yes, it was a sort of spring fever.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

Till the last moment they dress a man up in peacock's feathers, till the last moment they hope for the good and not the bad; and though they may have premonitions of the other side of the coin, for the life of them they will not utter a real word beforehand; the thought alone makes them cringe; they wave the truth away with both hands, till the very moment when the man they've decked out so finely sticks their noses in it with his own two hands.

And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window.

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

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