Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “They were like two enemies in love with one another.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

352. “Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

358. “Talk nonsense to me, by all means, but do it with your own brain, and I shall love you for it. To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that is someone else’s; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

359. “The consciousness of life is higher than life.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

360. “In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

361. “I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

362. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

364. “I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies – I exist. I’m tormented on the rack – but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar – I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

365. “From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is precious.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

366. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

368. “A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

369. “Let us be servants in order to be leaders.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

370. “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

371. “God is the pain of the fear of death.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

372. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

375. “Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

376. “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

377. “For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

378. “We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

379. “What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

380. “Make us your slaves, but feed us.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

381. “Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

382. “Roman Catholicism was not Christianity; you asserted that Rome proclaimed Christ subject to the third temptation of the devil. Announcing to all the world that Christ without an earthly kingdom cannot hold his ground upon earth, Catholicism by so doing proclaimed Antichrist and ruined the whole Western world.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

383. “I do not wish you much happiness – it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people’s philosophy, I will simply repeat: ‘Live more’ and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

384. “The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

385. “It’s in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

386. “To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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387. “One man doesn’t believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

388. “The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

389. “I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

391. “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

392. “Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

393. “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

394. “I’ve always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I’ve been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I’ve looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

395. “But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

397. “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

398. “One can fall in love and still hate.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

399. “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

400. “There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky