Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of "much cleverer" people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to be original. But this class of person, as we have observed above, is far less happy than the first. The difficulty is that the intelligent "ordinary" man, even if he does imagine himself at times (and perhaps all his life) a person of genius and originality, nevertheless retains within his heart a little worm of doubt, which sometimes leads the intelligent man in the end to absolute despair. If he does yield in this belief, he is still completely poisoned with inward-driven vanity.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Originality and the feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Every time you pray if your prayer is sincere there will be new feeling and new meaning in it which will give you fresh courage and you will understand that prayer is an education.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Who doesn't desire his father's death?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Every time you pray if your prayer is sincere there will be new feeling and new meaning in it which will give you fresh courage and you will understand that prayer is an education.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Who doesn't desire his father's death?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing but if we are to give everything its due twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We are all happy if we only knew it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Change is what people fear most.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man is a pliant animal a being who gets accustomed to anything.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
People talk sometimes of 'bestial' cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beast; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically, so artfully cruel.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You are really angry with me for not having appeared to you in a red glow, with thunder and lightning, with scorched wings
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I love it when people lie! Lying is only man's privilege over all other organisms. Lying is what makes me a man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it--which is what matters most.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I love her with all my soul. Why, she is a child! She's a child now — a real child. Oh! you know nothing about it at all, I see.""And are you assured, at the same time, that you love Aglaya too?""Yes — yes — oh; yes!""How so? Do you want to make out that you love them BOTH?""Yes — yes — both! I do!""Excuse me, prince, but think what you are saying! Recollect yourself!""Without Aglaya — I — I MUST see Aglaya! — I shall die in my sleep very soon — I thought I was dying in my sleep last night. Oh! if Aglaya only knew all — I mean really, REALLY all! Because she must know ALL — that's the first condition towards understanding. Why cannot we ever know all about another, especially when that other has been guilty? But I don't know what I'm talking about — I'm so confused. You pained me so dreadfully. Surely — surely Aglaya has not the same expression now as she had at the moment when she ran away? Oh, yes! I am guilty and I know it — I know it! Probably I am in fault all round — I don't quite know how — but I am in fault, no doubt. There is something else, but I cannot explain it to you, Evgenie Pavlovitch. I have no words; but Aglaya will understand. I have always believed Aglaya will understand — I am assured she will.""No, prince, she will not. Aglaya loved like a woman, like a human being, not like an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince? The most probable explanation of the matter is that you never loved either the one or the other in reality.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In any case, you must remember, my dearest, that the main strength of innocence is innocence itself. farewell.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now !I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We've got facts," they say. But facts aren't everything; at least half the battle consists in how one makes use of them!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You don't feed nightingales on fairy-tales
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Listen! This is where it began but I keep getting muddled... The fact of the matter is that I now want to recall everything, every trifle, every little detail. I still want to collect my thoughts and - I can't, and now there are these little details, these little details...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don't want millions, but an answer to their questions.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- What is a Socialist?- That's when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no marriages, and everyone has any religion and laws he likes best. You are not old enough to understand that yet.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it's heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: 'Yes, this is true, this is good.' This . . . this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don't forgive anything, because there is no longer anything to forgive. You don't really love — oh, what is here is higher than love! What's most frightening is that it's so terribly clear, and there's such joy. If it were longer than five seconds — the soul couldn't endure it and would vanish. In those five seconds I live my life through, and for them I would give my whole life, because it's worth it. To endure ten seconds one would have to change physically . . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There are people who thirst for blood like tigers. Any man who has once tasted this unlimited power over the blood, over the body and spirit of a human creature like himself, a creature created in the same image and subject to the same law of Christ; any man who has tasted this power, this boundless opportunity to humiliate most bitterly another being made in the image of God — becomes the servant instead of the master of his own emotions. Tyranny is a habit. It can and does eventually develop into a disease. I believe that the best of men may grow coarse, degrade to the level of a beast by sheer force of habit. Blood and power intoxicate one, they develop callousness and lust. The greatest perversions grow finally acceptable and even delicious to mind and heart. The man and the citizen perish in the tyrant for ever and the return to human dignity, remorse and spiritual rebirth becomes scarcely possible to him. Besides, the example and mere possibility of arbitrary power are contagious; they are indeed a great temptation. A society which regards such things calmly is already corrupt at the roots.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
they may all be drunk at my place, but they're all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we'll lie our way to the truth
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Truth with love is a lie
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can … Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What's the most offensive is not their lying- one can always forgive lying- lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth- what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying....
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognises that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And no one, no one should know what passes between husband and wife if they love one another. And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
...and in fact I've noticed that faith always seems to be less in the daytime
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
a wise man is not afraid to face the truth
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If God thought it necessary to offer rewards for love, your God must be immoral.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one's own existence, and a denial of death. It's the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, 'the river of living water,' the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It's the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, 'the seeking for God,' as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It's a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot... such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and superstition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself trembles and cringes in a shameful way.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else… . Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It’s not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But in the end I'd marry her to the one she herself loved. To a father, the man his daughter falls in love with herself always seems the worst. That's how it is.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners, and that's the whole of eternity. I sometimes fancy something of that sort.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
She'll come, if not today, then tomorrow, but she'll find me. That's the cursed romanticism of all these pure hearts! Oh the vileness, oh the stupidity, oh the narrowness, of these rotten, sentimental souls
Fyodor Dostoyevsky