Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

262. “For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering. I believe really great men must experience great sadness in the world.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

263. “My friends, God is necessary for me if only because he is the one being who can be loved eternally.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

264. “If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s human, he’ll murder; if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

265. “I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

266. “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

267. “It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

268. “Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

269. “You began with a lie, what began with a lie was bound to also end with a lie. That is a law of nature.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

278. “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

279. “Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

280. “He could not endure without mortification, without resentment even, that the holiest of holy men should have been exposed to the jeering and spiteful mockery of the frivolous crowd so inferior to him.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

281. “A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

282. “Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man’s free will?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

283. “I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

284. “Woe to the man who offends a small child!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

285. “Does the fellow want his head smashed?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

286. “You are very beautiful, Aglaya Ivanovna, so beautiful that one is afraid to look at you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

287. “There is among the people a silent, long-suffering grief; it withdraws into itself and is silent.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

288. “Yes, universal history! It’s the study of the successive follies of mankind and nothing more.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

290. “When reason fails, the devil helps!” he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

291. “People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

293. “The whole question here is: am I a monster, or a victim myself?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

294. “It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

297. “A fool is always pleased with what he says, and, besides, he always says more than he needs to.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

298. “I wanted to tell you of a longing I have. I should like some one to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and go away. I don’t want to be happy.” “You are in love with disorder?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

299. “I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

300. “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