Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

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.

There is no virtue if there is no immortality.

Everything seems stupid when it fails.

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.

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

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

And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

Being in love doesn't mean loving.

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

Hell is the inability to love.

Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.

Everything passes, only truth remains.

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.

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

From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.

Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.

For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.

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

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

Beauty would save the world.

...it all, maybe, most likely, indeed, might turn out for the best.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.

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.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

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

It's not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles.

It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.

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.

This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.

Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.

One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

With love one can live even without happiness.

Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.

Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid!

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human

There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.

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

Whether one showed you and execution or a little finger, you would extract an equally edifying thought from both of them, and would still be content. That's the way to get on in life.

Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.

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

You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.

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

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

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.