Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (341 Quotes)

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

A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.

An angel in heaven I've told already; but I want to tell an angel on earth.

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.

I understand solidarity in sin among men; solidarity in retribution I also understand; but what solidarity in sin do little children have? ...And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price.

Man is broad, too broad, indeed. I'd have him narrower.

There is no virtue if there is no immortality.

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 ...

Catch several hares and you won't catch one.

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

Evidently habit does wonders! God knows what habit can do with anyone.

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.

Being in love doesn't mean loving.

He thirsted for this resurrection and renewal. The vile bog he had gotten stuck in of his own free will burdened him too much, and, like a great many men in such cases, he believed most of all in a change of place: if only it weren't for these people, if only it weren't for these circumstances, if only one could fly away from the curses place--then everything would be reborn! That was what he believed in and what he longed for.

It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.

Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty of all for the crime of the one standing before him.

To my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief...Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness

A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.