Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the PRIVACY of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

102. “I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

103. “I know that you don’t believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

104. “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

106. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

108. “Everything seems stupid when it fails.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

109. “I have a plan-to go mad.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

112. “Everything passes, only truth remains.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

122. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

129. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

131. “I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

136. “Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

138. “Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

139. “Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

141. “I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

142. “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

143. “My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

144. “I am too young and I’ve loved you too much.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

145. “You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

146. “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

147. “It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

148. “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

149. “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

150. “It’s the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky