Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” Quotes (33 Quotes)

In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.

Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophecy.

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

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.

You say I haven't any orginality. But mark this, dear Prince, there's nothing more annoying for a man of our time and race than to tell him he's not original, a weak character with no special talents, ordinary in other words. You didn't even deign to regard me as a genuine rogue, I felt like killing you for that just now, you know that?

And I fancy, besides, that we seem like such different people ... through various circumstances, that we cannot perhaps have many points in common. But yet I don't believe in that last idea myself, for it often only seems that there are no points in common, when there really are some ... it's just laziness that makes people classify themselves according to appearances, and fail to find anything in common.... But perhaps I am boring you? You seem ...

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

Anyone who attacks individual charity, attacks human nature and casts contempt on personal dignity.

Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end up by eating one another, that's what I prophesy.

At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.

Moje s?owa nie odpowiadaja; moim mys'lom, a to poniz.a moje mys'li.

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

Nie jestem tch?rzem. Tch?rzem jest ten kto sie; boi i ucieka a ja sie; boje;, ale nie uciekam.

Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence.

Oh I've plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.

Delicacy and dignity are taught by one's own heart, not by a dancing master.

One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!

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

Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness

First you have to buy powder, pistol powder, not the damp, and not as coarse as for a cannon. Then you have to put the powder in first, and get some felt off a door. And then you have to put the bullet in afterwards, and not the bullet before the powder, or it won't go off. Do you hear, Keller? or else it won't go off. Ha-ha! Isn't that a magnificent reason, friend Keller?

Some people have luck, and everything comes out right with them; others have none, and never a thing turns out fortunately.

God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.

The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else - something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.

God knows what is in me in place of me.

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.

I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

I must add... my gratitude to you for the attention with which you have listened to me, for, from my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse.

We degrade Providence too much by attributing our ideas to it out of annoyance at being unable to understand it.

I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction -- if a house is falling upon you, for instance -- one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one's eyes and wait, come what may . . .

We must name the eminent and fascinating Prince N. - once the vanquisher of female hearts all over Europe.

If he's alive he has everything in his power! Whose fault is it he doesn't understand that

We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.