Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

103. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

105. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

113. “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

114. “Everything seems stupid when it fails.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

116. “Everything passes, only truth remains.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

117. “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

121. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

123. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

127. “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

128. “I have a plan-to go mad.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

133. “If not reason, then the devil.”

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

137. “Hell is the inability to love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

138. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

143. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

145. “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

146. “They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

147. “Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

148. “Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

149. “For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

150. “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