Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

452. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

454. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

456. “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

457. “What is honour, my dear, when you have nothing to eat?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

458. “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

459. “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

460. “Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

466. “One circumstance tormented me then: Namely, that no one else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am only one, and they are all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

467. “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

468. “Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

469. “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

470. “It’s precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

471. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

473. “Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

477. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “Alyosha’s heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

486. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

488. “Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

489. “If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.”

— 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. “If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

497. “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

498. “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

499. “I am crazy about mysterious things.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

500. “People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky