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

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

Catch several hares and you won't catch one.

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

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!

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.

A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.

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 ?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 … ?

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.

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.

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

To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's.

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.

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

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.

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.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.

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!

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

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.

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

It wasn't you I was bowing to, but the whole of human suffering.

Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?

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.