Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (341 Quotes)

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.

He is guilty, but he will be acquitted, from motives of humanity, in accordance with the new ideas, the new sentiments that had come into fashion,

I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

One day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel, try to outshine each other and keep grudges against each other? Let's go straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate each other and glorify life.

The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

They were like two enemies in love with one another.

You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don't even believe in virtue--that's what makes you angry and torments you, that's why you're so vindictive.

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.

And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window.

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

Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.

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

But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

One circumstance tormented me then: Namely, that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am only one, and they are all.

Yet, I didn't understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently invaded; and who, until the last moment, refuse to yield out of pride and are afraid to express their own feelings to you.

Be near your brothers. Not just one, but both of them.

Every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.

He noticed that Ivan swayed as he walked and that his right shoulder was lower than his left. He had never noticed it before.