Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.

Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?

But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.

He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly.

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

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

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.

Then Christ will say to us, 'Come you also! Come you drunkards! Come you weaklings! Come you depraved!' And he will say to us, 'Vile creatures, you in the image of the beast and you who bear his mark. All the same, you come too!' And the wise and prudent will say, 'Lord, why are you welcoming them? And he will say, 'O wise and prudent, I am welcoming them because not one of them has ever judged himself worthy. And he will stretch out his arms to us, and we shall fall at his feet, and burst into sobs, and then we shall understand everything, everything! Lord, your kingdom come!

My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.

A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.

To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.

The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.

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.

Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.

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.

Money is coined liberty.

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

I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom - God man or man God.

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

Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?

In the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night.

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

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.

Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.

Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.

He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.

Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time.

Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness.

It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom , as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.

Gambling is a most foolish and imprudent pursuit.

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.

Only through suffering can we find ourselves.

The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it.

They were like two enemies in love with one another.

I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.

Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.

Beauty would save the world.

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.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

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

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.

Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall ...

And it is so simple ... The one thing is - love thy neighbor as thyself - that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.

I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.

To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.

Make us your slaves, but feed us.

Taking a new step ... is what people fear most.

For example, I'm terribly proud. I'm as mistrustful and as sensitive as a hunchback or a dwarf; but, in truth, I've experienced some moments when if someone had slapped my face, I might even have been grateful for it. I'm being serious. I probably would have been able to derive a peculiar sort of pleasure from it-the pleasure of despair, naturally, but the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when you're very acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament.

But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.

On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering.

I am crazy about mysterious things.

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

You simply can't imagine what men will say!

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

If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love

Chance may do anything.

If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.

The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.

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!

I do not wish you much happiness
it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people's philosophy, I will simply repeat: 'Live more' and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.

Of course I shall go astray often ... for who does not make mistakes? But I cannot go far wrong for I have seen the truth.

Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.

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

Let us first fulfill Christ's injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves.

Above all, do not lie to yourself.

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

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

Remember, too, every day, and whenever you can, repeat to yourself, Lord, have mercy on all who appear before Thee today. For every hour and every moment thousands of men leave life on this earth, and their souls appear before God. And how many of them depart in solitude, unknown, sad, dejected that no one mourns for them or even knows whether they have lived or not!

Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.

Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.

We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.

I never have frustrations. The reason is to wit: Of at first I don't succeed, I quit!

The consciousness of life is higher than life.

A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.

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.

I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. And it was after that that I found out the truth . I learnt the truth last November on the third of November, to be precise and I remember every instant since.

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

He who masters the grey everyday is a hero.

To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.

I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings of what? Of the truth , for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes , have seen it in all its glory .

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it - that is what you must do.

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.

In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.

If there is no God, then I am God.

Above all, don't lie to yourself.

If the person laughs well, they are a good person.

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.

Trifles, trifles are what matter!

If not reason, then the devil.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.

When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.

Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance ... Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do ... It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.

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

All people seem to be divided into'ordinary'and 'extraordinary'. The ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because?theyare ordinary.Whereas the extraordinary people have the right to commit any crime they like and transgress the law in any way just because they happen to be extraordinary.