Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

452. “To her, and to father! Whew! A coincidence! Why was I calling you, wishing for you, why was I longing and thirsting for you with every curve of my soul and even with my ribs? Because I wanted to send you precisely to father, and then to her as well, to Katerina Ivanovna, to have done with her and with father. To send an angel. I could have sent anybody, but I need to send an angel. And here you are going to her and father yourself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

453. “You believe in the crystal palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you can never stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture, even with your fist hidden away. Well, perhaps I’m so afraid of this building precisely because it’s made of crystal and it’s eternally indestructible, and because it won’t be possible to stick one’s tongue out even furtively.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

454. “To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

455. “And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

456. “His wife, however, happened to be the only woman in his life who failed totally to arouse any passion in him whatsoever.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

457. “My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

458. “Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

459. “At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

460. “As a Russian proverb has it, ‘Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

461. “No, life is only given to me once and I shall never have it again; I don’t want to wait for ‘the happiness of all.’ I want to live myself, or else better not live at all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

462. “He said that those five minutes seemed to him an infinite length of time, an immense richness; it seemed to him that during those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point in thinking about the last moment yet, so he made various allocations: he calculated the time he needed to say goodbye to his companions, and allotted some two minutes to it, then he allotted another two minutes to think about himself for the last time, and then look around him for the last time. He.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

463. “There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

464. “Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

465. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

466. “The first thing is to lower the level of education, science and accomplishment.1 A high level of science and accomplishment is accessible only to people of high ability, and there’s no need for high ability! People of high ability have always seized power and been despots. People of high ability can’t help but be despots and have always corrupted more than they have brought benefit; they are sent into exile or executed.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

467. “It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

468. “You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

469. “In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

470. “All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

471. “To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

472. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

473. “Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the 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!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

474. “I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

475. “Compassion was the principal and, perhaps, the only law of existence for the whole of mankind.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

476. “Lamentations ease the heart only by straining and exacerbating it more and more. Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

477. “Don’t quarrel with your bread and butter.” “They.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

478. “You have only to creep into a secluded corner or into a crocodile, to shut your eyes, and you immediately devise a perfect millennium for mankind.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

479. “The convict is greedy for money, to the point of madness, and if he throws it away he does so in order to procure what he values far above money – liberty, or at least semblance of liberty.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

480. “He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

482. “You see, Rodya, to my thinking, the great thing for getting on in the world is always to keep to the seasons; if you don’t insist on having asparagus in January, you keep your money in your purse!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

483. “It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

484. “But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

485. “The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

486. “The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

488. “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

489. “Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

491. “Speak of a wolf and you see his tail!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

492. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

493. “Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

494. “The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

496. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

498. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

499. “In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

500. “The chief thing is to love others likeyourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted – you will find out at once how to arrange it all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky