Top 684 Quotes & Sayings by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Page 5

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

If not reason, then the devil.

There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men's sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.

The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three...And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere!

Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?

a man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing.

Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

They were like two enemies in love with one another.

The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.

For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.

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

I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?

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!

Above all, do not lie to yourself.

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

In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.

You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it-which is what matters most.

It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.

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

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.

I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.

I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered.

Know that I've forgotten precisely nothing; but I've driven it all out of my head for a time, even the memories--until I've radically improved my circumstances. Then...then you'll see, I'll rise from the dead!

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.

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.

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

Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

To cook your hare you must first catch it.

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!

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

If there were no God, he would have to be invented.

A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point...and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

One can tell a child everything, anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters.

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

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

Reason is the slave of passion.

Being in love doesn't mean loving.

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

There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself - but you just can't help it.

It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was.

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

In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilt for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.

I don’t understand anything...and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact...If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I’ve made up my mind to stick to the fact.

I've always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I've been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I've looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.

Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.

The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else - something that the atheists will for ever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.

When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.

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

Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.

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

How good life is when one does something good and just!

Every man needs a place to go to.