Top 684 Quotes & Sayings by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Page 2

If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.

Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.

Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.

I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus.

I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Only through suffering can we find ourselves.

Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

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

Everything passes, only truth remains.

The most offensive is not their lying - one can always forgive lying - lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth - what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.

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

She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age.

And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .

The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man ... just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people's sins. Go, and do not be afraid.

I don't need money, or, better, it's not money that I need; it's not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over!

Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

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

Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.

There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

Above all, don't lie to yourself.

People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people.

The man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence

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

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

To think too much is a disease.

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harrass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us!

From a hundred rabbits you can't make a horse.

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

Be the sun and all will see you.

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

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.

You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

When reason fails, the devil helps!

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

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

May you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?

I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

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

Right attitudes produces right action

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

And if there's love, you can do without happiness too. Even with sorrow, life is sweet.

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

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.

Wealth is the number of things one can do without.

The world will be saved by beauty.

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?