Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

One must love life before loving its meaning ... yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

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.

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.

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.

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

What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?

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

In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith.

Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.

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

Right attitudes produces right action

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

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.

Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

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

Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.

One must first learn to live oneself before one blames others.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.

If there were no God, he would have to be invented.

We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.

Man is bound to lie about himself

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

Luxuries are easy to take up but very difficult to give up

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.

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.

It's the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery.

Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.

I swear to you, sirs, that excessive consciousness is a disease--a genuine, absolute disease.

a man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing.

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

We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast?

Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.

Be the sun and all will see you.

All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.

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

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

If not reason, then the devil.

Above all, do not lie to yourself.

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.

To cook your hare you must first catch it.

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

I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.

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.

My friends, God is necessary for me if only because he is the one being who can be loved eternally.

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

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