Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “It’s in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

358. “My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

364. “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

365. “Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

367. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

369. “What is honour, my dear, when you have nothing to eat?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

370. “You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

371. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

373. “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

374. “Suffering, too, is a good thing. Suffer!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

376. “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

377. “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

378. “Truth with love is a lie.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

383. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

386. “He’s an intelligent man, but it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

392. “There’s the Holy Ghost and there’s the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can appear as other birds- sometimes as a swallow, sometimes a goldfinch and sometimes as a blue-tit.” “How do you know him from an ordinary tit?” “He speaks.” “How does he speak, in what language?” “Human language.” “And what does he tell you?” “Why, to-day he told me that a fool would visit me and would ask me unseemly questions. You.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

397. “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

398. “Being in love doesn’t mean loving.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky