Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.

If you can put the question, 'Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?' then you are responsible.

Only through suffering can we find ourselves.

Gambling is a most foolish and imprudent pursuit.

they may all be drunk at my place, but they're all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we'll lie our way to the truth

The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.

What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.

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

Do you know I don't know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it's only that I'm not able to express it...And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God's sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!

Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells.

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.

Catch several hares and you won't catch one.

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. [...] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.

But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

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.

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

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.

Humanity can live without science, it can live without bread, but it cannot live without beauty. Without beauty, there would be nothing left to do in this life. Here the secret lies. Here lies the entire story.

It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

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.

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.

"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

Loving someone is different from being in love with someone. You can hate someone you're in love with

My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.

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.

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.

I must add... my gratitude to you for the attention with which you have listened to me, for, from my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse.

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

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

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 prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.

I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!

Be the sun and all will see you.

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

Above all, don't lie to yourself.

Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts.

And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.

Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness

Being in love doesn't mean loving.

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.

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.

Now I'm living out my life in a corner, trying to console myself with the stupid, useless excuse that an intelligent man cannot turn himself into anything, that only a fool can make anything he wants out of himself.

I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creatures is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom […] Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?