Top 684 Quotes & Sayings by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Page 7

Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.

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

The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!

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

There is no virtue if there is no immortality.

Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.

Life [had] replaced logic.

But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

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.

There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.

originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.

There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.

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?

I am too young and I've loved you too much.

Love life more than the meaning of it?

One can fall in love and still hate.

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 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!

Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.

It's not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles.

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?

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

You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.

If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.

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

Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.

I have a plan-to go mad.

Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.

It wasn't the New World that mattered... Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life - the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.

And, indeed, I will at this point ask an idle question on my own account: which is better — cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?

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.

For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!

Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one's heart, out of old habit..." --Ivan Karamazov

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human

There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.

From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.

One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!

I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.

Beggars, especially noble beggars, should never show themselves in the street; they should ask for alms through the newspapers. It's still possible to love one's neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.

- What is a Socialist? - That's when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no marriages, and everyone has any religion and laws he likes best. You are not old enough to understand that yet.

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.

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!

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.

Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.

I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.

Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!

Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?

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.

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.

The Russian soul is a dark place.

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.

Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth.

... the more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person

Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread".

But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.

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.