Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

103. “Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the PRIVACY of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

104. “I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

106. “The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

107. “The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

108. “Only through suffering can we find ourselves.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

109. “There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men’s sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

110. “I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

111. “Be the sun and all will see you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

112. “Everything seems stupid when it fails.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

113. “A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

114. “I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

115. “Everything passes, only truth remains.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

116. “Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don’t trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

117. “Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

118. “If God is dead, everything is allowed.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

119. “Love life more than the meaning of it?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

120. “Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

121. “I have a plan-to go mad.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

122. “Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

123. “Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

124. “A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

125. “One can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan’t understand them thoroughly.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

126. “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

127. “Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

128. “Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

129. “I’m a master of speaking silently – all my life I’ve spoken silently and I’ve lived through entire tragedies in silence.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

130. “Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: “Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.””

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

131. “My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

132. “Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

133. “Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

134. “And you’re sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes – you’re sorry, for you didn’t even have time to fall in love...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

135. “If not reason, then the devil.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

136. “The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

137. “Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

138. “In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

139. “Hell is the inability to love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

140. “Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

141. “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

142. “I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

143. “In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

144. “Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

145. “The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

146. “Life had stepped into the place of theory.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

147. “Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

148. “There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

149. “Because I’m a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

150. “Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky