Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

252. “In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

253. “God is the pain of the fear of death.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

254. “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

255. “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

256. “Life is what matters, life alone – the continuous, eternal process of discovering life – and not the discovery itself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

257. “In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

258. “Life is in ourselves and not in the external.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

259. “I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

260. “The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

261. “I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

262. “For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

263. “I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it in my mind. I have seen it, SEEN IT and the living image of it has filled my soul forever...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

264. “It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn’t help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

265. “You can’t be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

266. “What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

267. “I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

268. “Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

269. “Look how our young people commit suicide, without asking themselves Hamlet’s question what there is beyond, without a sign of such a question, as though all that relates to the soul and to what awaits us beyond the grave had long been erased in their minds and buried under the sands.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

270. “A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

271. “Make us your slaves, but feed us.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

272. “If you can put the question, ‘Am I or am I not responsible for my acts?’ then you are responsible.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

273. “Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

274. “I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies – I exist. I’m tormented on the rack – but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar – I exist! 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

275. “In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

276. “Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

277. “Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

278. “I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

279. “Let us be servants in order to be leaders.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

280. “I do not wish you much happiness – it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people’s philosophy, I will simply repeat: ‘Live more’ and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

281. “The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

282. “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

283. “I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

284. “Hold your tongue; you won’t understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

285. “Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognises that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

286. “What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

287. “Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

288. “Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

289. “People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

290. “Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

291. “There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

292. “Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

293. “One cannot love what one does not know.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

294. “Do you know I’ve been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced, in fact, that everything is disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment – still I should want to live and, having once tried of the cup, I would not turn from it until I have drained it!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

295. “Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

296. “We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

297. “An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

298. “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

299. “Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

300. “Hang your merit. I don’t seek anyone’s approbation.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky