Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

302. “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

303. “Everyone thinks of himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive himself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

305. “A dead man has no age.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

306. “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

307. “Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that’s what you must do.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

308. “My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it’s absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

309. “Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

310. “Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

312. “Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

313. “It is man’s unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

314. “Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

315. “We are all happy if we but knew it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

316. “A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

317. “No, evidently habit means a lot. The devil knows what habit can do to a person.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

318. “In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

320. “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

321. “Latterly he tormented me, too: it was all quite natural, human beings are created in order to torment one another.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

322. “If it were considered desirable to destroy a human being, the only thing necessary would be to give his work a character of uselessness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

323. “You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

324. “Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men I think, must feel great sorrow in this world.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

325. “We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

326. “It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself – as though that were so necessary – that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

327. “For if there’s no everlasting God, there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

328. “The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

329. “How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

330. “On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

331. “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

332. “Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

333. “To confess one’s guilt and one’s original sin is little, very little; one must wean oneself away from them completely. And that takes more than a little time.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

334. “Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

335. “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

336. “Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

337. “Human laziness makes people pigeonhole one another at first site so that they find nothing in common with one another.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

338. “On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

339. “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

340. “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

341. “Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the ‘wee ones,’ because there are little children and big children. All people are ‘wee ones.’ And I’ll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

342. “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

343. “We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

344. “Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

345. “Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

346. “No matter. He is holy. He carries in his heart the secret of renewal for all: that power which will, at last, establish truth on the earth, and all men will be holy and love one another, and there will be no more rich nor poor, no exalted nor humbled, but all will be as the children of God, and the true Kingdom of Christ will come.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

347. “Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labour. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Every one can love occasionally, even the wicked can.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

349. “What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

350. “Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky