Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.”

“Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.”

“The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was 'sublime and beautiful,'the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.”

“Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it's like a dream.”

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”

“I want to suffer so that I may love.”

“Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.”

“He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly.”

“Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window”

“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.”

“The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.”

“Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we...yes, I assure you...we should be begging to be under control again at once.”

“... active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one's life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and eveyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.”

“I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings of what? Of the truth , for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes , have seen it in all its glory .”

“Catch several hares and you won't catch one.”

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.”

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

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

“I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. And it was after that that I found out the truth . I learnt the truth last November on the third of November, to be precise and I remember every instant since.”

“In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.”

“Luxuries are easy to take up but very difficult to give up”

“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.”

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”

“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.”