Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes on Man (12 Quotes)

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering . . .

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart Oh, Thou didst know that Thy deed would be recorded in books, would be handed down to remote times and the utmost ends of the earth, and Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft, though he might be a hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.