Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

454. “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

455. “I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

461. “Roman Catholicism was not Christianity; you asserted that Rome proclaimed Christ subject to the third temptation of the devil. Announcing to all the world that Christ without an earthly kingdom cannot hold his ground upon earth, Catholicism by so doing proclaimed Antichrist and ruined the whole Western world.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

465. “Talk nonsense to me, by all means, but do it with your own brain, and I shall love you for it. To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that is someone else’s; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

466. “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

467. “The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

468. “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

469. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

472. “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

473. “One can fall in love and still hate.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

474. “The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

475. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

476. “Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

479. “There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

481. “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

482. “Alyosha exclaimed. “I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world.” “Love life more than its meaning?” “Certainly, love it before logic, as you say, certainly before logic, and only then will I also understand its meaning.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

483. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

485. “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

486. “Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

487. “But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

488. “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

489. “Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

492. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

493. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

497. “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

498. “I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be grander and richer – and then it struck me that life may be grand enough even in a prison.”

— 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. “Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky