Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

305. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

311. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “A dead man has no age.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

321. “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

322. “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

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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

328. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

330. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

332. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

335. “I want to suffer so that I may love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

336. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

338. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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