Quotes & Sayings About Dostoevsky

What is hell? ... The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

My longing was for Russia ... Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky's saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy's Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in "God Sees the Truth But Waits." A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done? — Guy Vanderhaeghe

At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

She was thinking - for, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other way - that all this had been described in Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silent - for here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding. — Doris Lessing

Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! — Fyodor Dostoevsky

That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists ... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid ... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but where is there any mirth in our time, and do people know how to be mirthful? ... A man's mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how we weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Taking a new step ... is what people fear most. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside. — Robert Wilson Lynd

To love someone means to see him as God intended him. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Above all, don't lie to yourself. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Chance may do anything. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Money is coined liberty. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. A young man sits in one. — Bruce Robinson

The catharsis that finalizes Dostoevsky's novels might be - of course inadequately and somewhat rationalistically - expressed in this way: nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future — Mikhail Bakhtin

The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

It's in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

In actual fact, the utterly incompatible elements comprising Dostoevsky's material are distributed among several worlds and several autonomous consciousnesses; they are presented not within a single field of vision but within several fields of vision, each full and of equal worth; and it is not the material directly but these worlds, their consciousnesses with their individual fields of vision that combine in a higher unity, a unity, so to speak, of the second order, the unity of a polyphonic novel. — Mikhail Bakhtin

In Dostoevsky, two thoughts are already two people, for there are no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person. This — Mikhail Bakhtin

I have a plan-to go mad. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Is it really not possible to touch the gaming table without being instantly infected by superstition? — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Make us your slaves, but feed us. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky,the only psychologist from whom I've anything to learn. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The sky was horribly dark , but one could distinctly see tattered clouds , and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star , and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea : I decided to kill myself that night . — Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is given to all of Dostoevsky's characters to "think and seek higher things"; in each of them there is a "great and unresolved thought"; all of them must, before all else, "get a thought straight." And in this resolution of a thought (an idea) lies their entire real life and their own personal unfinalizability. If — Mikhail Bakhtin

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul. — Svetlana Alexievich

As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher. — John Banville

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, ... perhaps better than we actually are. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. — Flannery O'Connor

I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it. — Isaac Hempstead-Wright

Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Only through suffering can we find ourselves. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's authorial activity is evident in his extension of every contending point of view to its maximal force and depth, to the outside limits of plausibility. He strives to expose and develop all the semantic possibilities embedded in a given point of view (Chernyshevsky, as we have seen, strove for the same thing in his Pearl of Creation). This Dostoevsky knew how to do with extraordinary power. And this activity, the intensifying of someone else's thought, is possible only on the basis of a dialogic relationship to that other consciousness, that other point of view. We — Mikhail Bakhtin

I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

No, the hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view on the world and on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self and his surrounding reality. — Mikhail Bakhtin

It is a pity that there was no Dostoevsky living near this most interesting decadent [Jesus], I mean someone with an eye for the distinctive charm that this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness, and childishness has to offer. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good. — Haruki Murakami

Only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long, tumultuous stretches;
look what intensity did to poor Van Gogh! — John Tagliabue

Life is what matters, life alone - the continuous, eternal process of discovering life - and not the discovery itself. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of the things that Dostoevsky talks about is that no character is too high to fall and no character is too low to be redeemed. 'Crime and Punishment' began with a person going out and consciously becoming a cold-blooded murderer, and it took 800 pages and an epilogue before the person finally asked for forgiveness. — Jeffrey Bell

Listen, Parfyon, a few moments ago you asked me a question, and this is my answer: the essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with any reasoning, or any crimes and misdemeanors or atheism; is is something entirely different and it will always be so; it is something our atheists will always overlook, and they will never talk about THAT. But the important thing is that you will notice it most clearly in a Russian heart, and that's the conclusion I've come to! This is one of the chief convictions I have acquired in our Russia. There's work to be done, Parfyon. Believe me, there's work to be done in our Russian world! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor. — Lev Shestov

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow? — George Steiner

A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort — Fyodor Dostoevsky

In none of Dostoevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit; in fact there is no evolution, no growth in general, — Mikhail Bakhtin

If God is dead, everything is allowed. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I am a sick man ... I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, i don't know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine. What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito
out! Every simile that would have made sub-moron's mouth twitch
gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer
lost!
Every story slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like
in the finale
Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention
shot dead. — Ray Bradbury

" You think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth." --Crime and punishment, F. Dostoevsky — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others. — David Foster Wallace

If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. — Tom Hodgkinson

The man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind. — Svetlana Alexievich

A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point ... and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

When I was having my hair and make-up done backstage at a fashion show, I would sneak in a copy of Dostoevsky and read it inside a copy of Elle or Vogue. But it would be pretentious of me to say I was more intelligent than the other supermodels. — Carla Bruni

If you can put the question, 'Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?' then you are responsible. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

And remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.
If you think they didn't go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you're doing now
without women
without food
without hope
then you're not ready.
drink more beer.
there's time.
and if there's not
that's all right
too. — Charles Bukowski

You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman ...
'You never can tell ... ' he answered.
'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal! — Mikhail Bulgakov

At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it. I laid down the largest stake allowe-four thousand gulden-and lost it. Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it on the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news. — Robert Wilson Lynd

The degree of a nation's civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I am crazy about mysterious things. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Yes, that's right ... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three ... And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere! — Fyodor Dostoevsky

My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality's almost impossible to describe or account for straight out - it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility - and critics' attempts to reduce it to questions of "style" are almost universally lame. — David Foster Wallace

I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle , my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one's own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears ... . — Arthur Koestler

Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave. — Georg Brandes

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. — Phil Klay

When ... in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests? — Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them - the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires." — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harrass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us! — Fyodor Dostoevsky

If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

One could never judge a man without seeing him close, for oneself ... — Fyodor Dostoevsky

...Such a subcontinental thing to do, no? To bury what is difficult and painful in cerebral things. To let the intellect soak up the blood from a fight. This is what we do. Not because we lack sensitivity, but because we lack the right language for emotion. English has such a jealous hold over us, but it is a hard and brittle thing in our hands. It doesn't suit the easy melodrama of our natures. And it has a way of making matters of the heart seem at once inert and deeply shameful. So what do upper-class Indian men do when they are too wretched to do anything else? They talk of the Russians! Of Dostoevsky and Belinsky, of "cultural schizophrenia" and "the lackeyishness of thinking"... — Aatish Taseer

I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote and infinite time and space, but here on Earth ... I want to see with my own eyes the lamb lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been about. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. — Fyodor Dostoevsky