Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

Catch several hares and you won't catch one.

Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.

Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!

Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. If anyone finds out he'll become happy at once.

It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.

What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.

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.

One circumstance tormented me then: Namely, that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am only one, and they are all.

... you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.

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

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

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.

I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.

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

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.

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

They were like two enemies in love with one another.

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

Reason is the slave of passion.

The degree of a nation’s civilization can be seen in the way it treats its prisoners

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

Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.

The consciousness of life is higher than life.

... what you need more than anything in life is a definite position.

The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!

Oh I've plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.

Life [had] replaced logic.

Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously.

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor

One can fall in love and still hate.

It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.

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.

It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.

God knows what lives in me in place of me.

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

What is the use of Christ's words, unless we set an example?

I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.

That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.

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

.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness

I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it in my mind. I have seen it, SEEN IT and the living image of it has filled my soul forever.

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

...one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.

Make us your slaves, but feed us.

There is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

Forgive me... for my love -for ruining you with my love.

if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me--even then I would have jumped!