Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

202. “Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

203. “There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

204. “Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

205. “Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

206. “One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

207. “Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

208. “To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

209. “A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

210. “Realists do not fear the results of their study.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

211. “Whoever steps on the lowest step will surely step on the highest.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

212. “After all, bluff and real emotion exist so easily side by side.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

213. “Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

214. “Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

215. “There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

216. “Don’t think I’m talking nonsense because I’m drunk. I’m not a bit drunk. Brandy’s all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

217. “Now I’m living out my life in a corner, trying to console myself with the stupid, useless excuse that an intelligent man cannot turn himself into anything, that only a fool can make anything he wants out of himself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

218. “God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

219. “And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

220. “As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

221. “We don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

222. “Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them. The.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

223. “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

224. “The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

225. “Lying is a delightful thing for it leads to the truth.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

226. “Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

227. “Right attitudes produces right action.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

228. “You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

229. “The meaning is, that you all bore me to tears and I’d like to be left alone,′ Raskolnikov answered calmly.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

230. “It’s not miracles that generate faith, but faith that generates miracles.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

231. “Words are not deeds.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

232. “From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

233. “If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

234. “Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

235. “I worship her, Alyosha, worship her. Only she doesn’t see it. No, she still thinks I don’t love her enough. And she tortures me, tortures me with her love. The past was nothing! In the past it was only that infernal body of hers that tortured me, but now I’ve taken all her soul into my soul and through her I’ve become a man. Will they marry us? If they don’t I will die of jealousy. I imagine something every day...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

237. “Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it – that is what you must do.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

238. “How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

239. “And do you know, Sonia, that low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

240. “He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

241. “A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

242. “Every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

244. “But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

245. “Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

246. “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

247. “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

248. “I’ve never been a coward at heart, although I’ve always been a coward in action;.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

249. “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

250. “Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky