Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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.
When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.
God is necessary, and therefore must exist...But I know that he does not and cannot exist...Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?
There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.
That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.
I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what hurts.
I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!
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.
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.
If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness
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.
In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.
In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.
The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all.
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.
We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.
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!
Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good.
An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.
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.
Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?
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.
Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.
How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.
Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?
It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.