Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes
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451. “The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

452. “And in fact you’re not like everyone else: you weren’t ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

453. “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

454. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

456. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

457. “I am crazy about mysterious things.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

458. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

459. “You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it-which is what matters most.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

463. “We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

464. “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

465. “She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

467. “As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

468. “Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

469. “The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

470. “He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

471. “There is no virtue if there is no immortality.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

472. “Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

473. “I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky – that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

475. “It’s a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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476. “Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

478. “A dead man has no age.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

479. “If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

480. “Suffering, too, is a good thing. Suffer!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

481. “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

482. “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.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

483. “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

484. “My sweetheart! When I think of you, it’s as if I’m holding some healing balm to my sick soul, and although i suffer for you, i find that even suffering for you is easy.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

485. “But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

486. “Eh, brother, but nature has to be corrected and guided, otherwise we’d all drown in prejudices. Without that there wouldn’t be even a single great man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

487. “Gambling is a most foolish and imprudent pursuit.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

488. “Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men I think, must feel great sorrow in this world.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

490. “I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

491. “You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

492. “An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that – Count Leo Tolstoy.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

493. “That’s always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

494. “But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it’s for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

495. “I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

496. “I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

497. “She said nothing, she only looked at me without a word. But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don’t blame!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

498. “But all these are golden dreams.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

499. “In short, one may say anything about the history of the world – anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

500. “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