Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (341 Quotes)

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.

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.

I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.

Now I'm living out my life in a corner, trying to console myself with the stupid, useless excuse that an intelligent man cannot turn himself into anything, that only a fool can make anything he wants out of himself.

Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting.

And is it only a dream, that in the end man will find his joy in deeds of enlightenment and mercy alone, and not in cruel pleasures as now?

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.

He could not pass by children without his soul being shaken: such is the man.

I am too young and I've loved you too much.

If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love...Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.

Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.

Of the eternal questions, nothing else: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God will talk of socialism or anarchy, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, which all comes to the same thing, they're the same questions turned inside out.

The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.

They have this social justification for every nasty thing they do!

Yes, Lise. You see, your question whether we do not despise that unhappy man by dissecting his soul was the question of a person who has suffered a lot. I'm afraid I don't know how to put it properly, but a person to whom such questions occur is himself capable of suffering.

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!

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.

But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready to distort the truth, ready to hear nor see anything, as long as he can justify his logic.

I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?

Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.

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

And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.

Don't think I'm talking nonsense because I'm drunk. I'm not a bit drunk. Brandy's all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.

He doesn't have so much learning...or any special education either; he's silent, and he grins at you silently--that's how he gets by.

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.

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.

Listen, Kolya, by the way, you are going to be a very unhappy man in your life...But on the whole you will bless life all the same.

One can fall in love and still hate.

The marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage beast as man. So holy it is, so touching, so wise and so great a credit is to man.

They were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew that they would become unhappy.

Yet there have been and still are mathematicians and philosophers who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry. They even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity.

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

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.

But now, all of a sudden, there appeared before me the absurd, loathsomely spiderish notion of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins straight off with that which is the crown of true love.

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.

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?

And you and I had better go work on the land. I want to scrape the earth with my hands.

Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers.