Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes
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451. “Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

452. “My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it’s absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— 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. “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

456. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “Homeopathic doses are perhaps the strongest.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

469. “A dead man has no age.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

470. “I am crazy about mysterious things.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

471. “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

472. “If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s human, he’ll murder; if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

489. “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

490. “To confess one’s guilt and one’s original sin is little, very little; one must wean oneself away from them completely. And that takes more than a little time.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

492. “Latterly he tormented me, too: it was all quite natural, human beings are created in order to torment one another.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is precious.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

500. “I sometimes think love consists precisely of the voluntary gift by the loved object of the right to tyrannize over it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky