Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

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

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

you don't need free will to determine that twice two is four. that's not what i call free will

A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.

One must love life before loving its meaning ... yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.

Everything seems stupid when it fails.

If he's alive, everything is in his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn't understand that?

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

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.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

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

I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.

Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the 'wee ones,' because there are little children and big children. All people are 'wee ones.' And I'll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.

They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?

Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness

Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.

But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.

Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.

And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.

To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.

To think too much is a disease.

Compassion is the chief law of human existence.

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

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.

Whether one showed you and execution or a little finger, you would extract an equally edifying thought from both of them, and would still be content. That's the way to get on in life.

Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?

At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.

Oh, gentlemen, 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. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.

Taking a new step. . .is what people fear most.

Sometimes we desire absolute nonsense because in our stupidity we see in this nonsense the easiest way of attaining some conjectural good.

A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.

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.

Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.

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?

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

Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

Hang your merit. I don't seek anyone's approbation.

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 so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.

I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.

‎Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.

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

We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.

... 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

Two and two make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies.

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!

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!

Life [had] replaced logic.

What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people.

.. 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

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

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

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

The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!

Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it.

What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.