Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

213. “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

214. “Right attitudes produces right action.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

217. “If the person laughs well, they are a good person.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

218. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

220. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

222. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

227. “Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

229. “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

230. “Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live. That’s the goal for everyone.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

231. “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

232. “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

233. “He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

235. “It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

236. “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

237. “There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

239. “It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

240. “I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

241. “They were like two enemies in love with one another.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

242. “The consciousness of life is higher than life.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

243. “Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

244. “I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

245. “Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

246. “Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

247. “But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

249. “Humanity can live without science, it can live without bread, but it cannot live without beauty. Without beauty, there would be nothing left to do in this life. Here the secret lies. Here lies the entire story.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

250. “And if there’s love, you can do without happiness too. Even with sorrow, life is sweet.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky