Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The soul is healed by being with children.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

52. “It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

53. “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

54. “I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

55. “Money is coined liberty.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

56. “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

57. “To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

58. “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

59. “Without God all things are permitted.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

60. “A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

61. “If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

62. “If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

63. “A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

64. “I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

65. “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

66. “Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

67. “It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

68. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

69. “We are citizens of eternity.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

70. “I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

71. “Oh I’ve plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

72. “Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

73. “If he’s alive he has everything in his power! Whose fault is it he doesn’t understand that.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

74. “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

75. “If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

76. “I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

77. “Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

78. “He who masters the grey everyday is a hero.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

79. “Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God’s help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

80. “There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

81. “There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

82. “Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

83. “The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

84. “It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

85. “To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

86. “I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

87. “Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

88. “But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

89. “And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

90. “I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

91. “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

92. “Compassion is the chief law of human existence.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

93. “Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you – and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

94. “Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

95. “My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

96. “I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

97. “May you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

98. “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go, and do not be afraid.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

99. “Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

100. “Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky