Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes
Page 8 of 10

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

352. “And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

353. “Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

355. “To her, and to father! Whew! A coincidence! Why was I calling you, wishing for you, why was I longing and thirsting for you with every curve of my soul and even with my ribs? Because I wanted to send you precisely to father, and then to her as well, to Katerina Ivanovna, to have done with her and with father. To send an angel. I could have sent anybody, but I need to send an angel. And here you are going to her and father yourself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

356. “You believe in the crystal palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you can never stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture, even with your fist hidden away. Well, perhaps I’m so afraid of this building precisely because it’s made of crystal and it’s eternally indestructible, and because it won’t be possible to stick one’s tongue out even furtively.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

357. “Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

358. “Every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

360. “What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

361. “No, life is only given to me once and I shall never have it again; I don’t want to wait for ‘the happiness of all.’ I want to live myself, or else better not live at all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

362. “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

363. “Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

364. “You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid – and I know they are – yet I won’t be wiser?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

365. “There are strange friendships: two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

366. “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

367. “Which is better a cheap happiness or lofty suffering? Tell me then, which is better?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

368. “Who doesn’t desire his fathers death?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

369. “Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

370. “My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

371. “There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

372. “Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

373. “I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

374. “Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow – they don’t hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

375. “This life you cry up so much is what I wanted to extinguish by suicide, whereas my dream, my dream – oh, it has revealed to me a great, new, regenerated intensity of life!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

376. “You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

377. “You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

378. “He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

379. “To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

380. “Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

381. “I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

382. “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

383. “Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

384. “To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

385. “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

386. “Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. “I am alone and they are everyone,” I thought–and pondered.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

388. “As a Russian proverb has it, ‘Catch several hares and you won’t catch one.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

389. “I am a sick man... I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

390. “Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

391. “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

392. “In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilt for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

393. “His wife, however, happened to be the only woman in his life who failed totally to arouse any passion in him whatsoever.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

394. “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

395. “The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

396. “It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

397. “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

398. “Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

399. “In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

400. “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