Fyodor Dostoevsky quotes:

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

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.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

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.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Let it not be a beautiful face,' I thought, 'but to make up for that, let it be a noble, an expressive, and, above all, an extremely intelligent one.

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?

Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.

You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

One can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan't understand them thoroughly.

The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.

Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it.

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!

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

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.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man."

With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath.

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.

Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.

Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.

Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.

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

For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.

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!

I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

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

Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

Above all, don't lie to yourself.

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

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.

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.

For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison.

Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.

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

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.

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.

You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

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.

We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.

I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.

Catch several hares and you won't catch one.

The soul is healed by being with children.

He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.

Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man ... just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

I am crazy about mysterious things.

My sweetheart! When I think of you, it's as if I'm holding some healing balm to my sick soul, and although i suffer for you, i find that even suffering for you is easy.

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

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.

The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation... ...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.

Oh, if only I did nothing simply as a result of laziness.

When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness,... then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift... every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.

And if there's love, you can do without happiness too. Even with sorrow, life is sweet.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

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

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

I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I...I wanted to have the daring...and I killed her.

The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.

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

I don't need money, or, better, it's not money that I need; it's not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over!

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

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.

Beauty will save the world

What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

At some thoughts one stands perplexed - especially at the sight of men's sin - and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that, once and for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice-however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy-is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms... [an]will attain his object-that is, convince himself he is a man and not a piano-key!

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.

But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.

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.

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.

Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness

The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.

It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!

Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.

Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.

If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

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.

Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?...No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people's expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it--you'll find that a bit harder.

And in fact you're not like everyone else: you weren't ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment.

Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

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

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.

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

I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

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

But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.

Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

One's own free and unfettered volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness - that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it cannot fit into any classification and the omission of which sends all systems and theories to the devil.

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.