Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes & Sayings

I believed, I believe, I want to believe, and I will believe — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I really feel obliged to go to this confounded luncheon. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Our fatal troika dashes on in her headlong flight perhaps to destruction and in all Russia for long past men have stretched out imploring hands and called a halt to its furious reckless course. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Let me add, however, that in every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others, though you wrote volumes about it and spent thirty-five years in explaining your idea; something will always be left that will obstinately refuse to emerge from your head and that will remain with you for ever and you will die without having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps the most vital point of your idea. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Speak of a wolf and you see his tail! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I regard you as one of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer while he cuts their entrails out, if only they have found faith or God. Find it and you will live. You have long needed a change of air. Suffering, too, is a good thing. Suffer! Maybe Nikolay is right in wanting to suffer. I know you don't believe in it - but don't be over-wise; 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. What bank? How can I tell? I only believe that you have long life before you. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Yes, guilty.' It is better to let ten who are guilty go, than to punish one who is innocent - do you hear, do you hear this majestic voice from the last century of our glorious history? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Perezvon (the dog) ran about in the wildest spirits, sniffing about first one side, then the other. When he met other dogs they zealously smelt each other over according to the rules of canine etiquette. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Well, set the monster free ... he's begun his hymn, because he finds it all so easy ... but I'd give a quadrillion quadrillion for two seconds of joy. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Why had he happened to hear such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain was just conceiving ... the very same ideas? And why, just at the moment when he had brought away the embryo of his idea from the old woman had he dropped at once upon a conversation about her? This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This trivial talk in a tavern had an immense influence on him in his later action; as though there had really been in it something preordained, some guiding hint ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who ... prayed..with ... unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And if it is a mystery, then we, too, had the right to preach mystery and to teach them that it is not the free choice of the heart that matters, and not love, but the mystery, which they must blindly obey, even setting aside their own conscience. And so we did. We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have learned from bitter experience how misleading appearances often are, and that a snake sometimes lies hidden under flowers. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

he received no reply. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in that form. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you already because of the lies I had told you. Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As a child he was fond of hanging cats and then burying them with ceremony. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The queen who mended her stockings in prison must have looked every inch a queen and even more a queen than at sumptuous banquets and levees. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Yes, I'm glum, I'm continually closed. I often want to leave society. I may also do good to people, but often I don't see the slightest reason for doing good to them. And people are not at all so beautiful that they should be cared for so much. Why don't they come forward directly and openly, and why is it so necessary that I should go and foist myself on them? That's what I asked myself. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Alyosha was certain that no one in the whole world ever would want to hurt him, and what is more, he knew that no one could hurt him. This was for him an axiom, assumed once and for all without question. And he went his way without hesitation, relying on it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

you wouldn't have hurt me like this for nothing. So what have I done? How have I wronged you? Tell me. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's your rich life," Alyosha said softly. "Why, is it better to be poor?" "Yes, it is. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What gets me, Varinka, is not really the lack of money but all those little troubles life is full of, all whispering, all those jeers and jokes. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

after doing a good deed, assured me that all the credit belonged to me and that those many people who nowadays taught and preached that the individual good deed was of no significance were wrong. I was also very anxious to talk for a while. '"Whoever attacks individual 'charity'," I began, "attacks the nature of man and despises his personal dignity. But the organization of 'public charity' and the question of personal freedom are two different questions and are not mutually exclusive. Individual kindness will always remain, because it is a need of the personality, a living need for the direct influence of one personality on another. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People are alone on this earth - that's the problem! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Contemplative love seeks a heroic deed that can be accomplished without delay and in full view of everyone. Indeed, some people are even ready to lay down their lives as long as the process is not long drawn out but takes place quickly, as though it were being staged for everybody to watch and applaud. Active love, on the other hand, is unremitting hard work and tenacity, and for some it is a veritable science. But — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... ! And would I have been this way, would I have been this way on this night, and at this moment, sitting with you now, would I be talking like this, would I be moving like this, would I look at you and at the world like this, if I really were a parricide, when even the inadvertent killing of Grigory gave me no rest all night - not from fear, oh! not just from fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And you want me to reveal and tell about yet another new meanness of mine, yet another new disgrace, to such scoffers as you, who do not see anything and do not believe anything, blind moles and scoffers, even if it would save me from your accusation? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Not that I will ever believe there is nothing in common between any two people, as some declare is the case. I am sure people make a great mistake in sorting each other into groups, by appearances; — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To insects--sensual lust. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For the limited 'ordinary' person there is, for example, nothing easier to imagine himself to be unusual and original person, and to take enjoyment in this without hesitation. Some of our young ladies need only have their hair cut short, put on some blue spectacles and call themselves nihilists in order to be instantly persuaded that, having donned the spectacles, they have at once begun to possess their own 'convictions'. Some men need only feel a drop of some universally human and good-natured feeling within their hearts in order to be instantly persuaded that no one feels as they do, that they are in the vanguard of public enlightenment. Others need only accept some idea by word of mouth or read a page of something without beginning or end in order to instantly believe that this 'their own idea' and has been conceived within their own brains. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But destiny will be accomplished, and the best man will hold his ground while the undeserving one will vanish into his back-alley for ever - his filthy back-alley, his beloved back-alley, where he is at home and where he will sink in filth and stench at his own free will with enjoyment. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed - often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law - were — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

somehow touching yet repulsive — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Do not be angry with the audacity of a desperate and drowning man for making a last effort to save himself from perdition. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Why, I certainly won't leave you, Stepan Trofimovich, I'll never leave you, sir!' She seized his hands and clasped them in hers, and pressed them to her heart as she looked at him with tears in her eyes. ('I became very sorry for him at that moment,' she told us later.) His lips began to tremble, almost convulsively. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dreams, as we all know, are very curious things: certain incidents in them are presented with quite uncanny vividness, each detail executed with the finishing touch of a jeweller, while others you leap across as though entirely unaware of, for instance, space and time. Dreams seem to be induced not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what clever tricks my reason has sometimes played on me in dreams! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I remember being told of a poor wretch I once knew, who had died of hunger. I was almost beside myself with rage! I believe if I could have resuscitated him I would have done so for the sole purpose of murdering him! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A novel requires a hero, and here there's a deliberate collection of all the traits for an anti-hero — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A hundred suspicions don't make a proof. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that's what you must do. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet- and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him- and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity- it would be better to live so than to die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how- only to live! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists
and I mean not only the good ones
for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day
hate not even the wicked ones. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Love all God's creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A decent, educated man cannot afford the luxury of vanity without being exceedingly exacting with himself and without occasionally despising himself to the point of hatred. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I wanted to fathom her secrets; I wanted her to come to me and say: "I love you," and if not that, if that was senseless insanity, then ... well, what was there to care about? Did I know what I wanted? I was like one demented: all I wanted was to be near her, in the halo of her glory, in her radiance, always, for ever, all my life. I knew nothing more! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At first, right at the outset, yes, I did feel an urge, and I lapsed into great anxiety. I kept thinking all the time of how I was going to live; I wanted to test my fate, felt anxious particularly at certain moments. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. [ ... ] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Very well, then there's an experiment, and the thing is proved; one cannot live and count each moment; say what you like, but one cannot. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But the silent stranger could hardly have understood what was passing: she was a German who had not long been in Russia and knew not a word of Russian, and she seemed to be as stupid as she was handsome. She was a novelty and it had become a fashion to invite her to certain parties, sumptuously attired, with her hair dressed as though for a show, and to seat her in the drawing-room as a charming decoration, just as people sometimes borrow from their friends for a special occasion a picture, a statue, a vase, or a fire-screen. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At last my heart was too full. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

God is necessary, and therefore must exist ... But I know that he does not and cannot exist ... Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Love is higher than existence, love is the crown of existence; and how is it possible that existence should not be under its dominance? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from Him
Thou who has loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A complete lack of personality,1 that's what they're after, that's what excites them! Anything so as not to be themselves, not to resemble themselves! For them, that's the very height of progress. I — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Disbelief in the devil is a French notion, a frivolous notion. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The world will be saved by beauty. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.
We are oppressed at being men - men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And you still did not think of washing your hands even as you entered Mr. Perkhotin's? In other words, you were not afraid of arousing suspicion? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am glad that at such a moment my young man turned out to be not so reasonable; the time will come for an intelligent man to be reasonable, but if at such an exceptional moment there is no love to be found in a young man's heart, then when will it come? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But even to him I used to go only when such a spell came, and my dreams had reached such happiness that I needed, instantly and infallibly, to embrace people and the whole of mankind - for which I had to have available at least one really existing person. Anton Antonych, however, could be visited only on Tuesdays (his day), and consequently my need to embrace the whole of mankind always had to be adjusted to a Tuesday. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Prayer is an education. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking? To be sure, I won't break through such a wall with my forehead if I really have not got strength to do it, but neither will I be reconciled with it simply because I have a stone wall here and have not got strength enough. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Noble starets, tell me, are my high spirits offensive to you or not? Fyodor Pavlovich suddenly exclaimed, gripping the arms of his chair with both hands and appearing ready to leap out of it, depending on the reply. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

I'm drunk but truthful. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is in just such stupid things clever people are most easily caught. The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in. Porfiry is not such a fool as you think.... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And Liza, as soon as Alyosha was gone, unlocked the door at once, opened it a little, put her finger into the chink, and, slamming the door, crushed it with all her might. Ten seconds later, having released her hand, she went quietly and slowly to her chair, sat straight up in it, and began looking intently at her blackened finger and the blood oozing from under the nail. Her lips trembled, and she whispered very quickly to herself: "Mean, mean, mean, mean!. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But in those eyes and in the lines of her exquisite lips there was something with which his brother might well be passionately in love, but which perhaps could not be loved for long. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In any case civilization has made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Lying in one's own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else's way; in the first case you're a man, and in the second - no better than a bird! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Here was my whole life hanging on his one word! Surely I was serious enough? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And how many ideas there have been on earth in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared! Yet when their destined hour had come, they came forth and spread over the whole earth. So it will be with us, and our people will shine forth in the world, and all men will say: "The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone of the building. — 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

To return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one's habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? He is isolated, and what does he care about the whole? They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky