Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “Who doesn’t desire his fathers death?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

406. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

410. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

412. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

414. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

419. “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

420. “I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

422. “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

423. “The first thing is to lower the level of education, science and accomplishment.1 A high level of science and accomplishment is accessible only to people of high ability, and there’s no need for high ability! People of high ability have always seized power and been despots. People of high ability can’t help but be despots and have always corrupted more than they have brought benefit; they are sent into exile or executed.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

424. “At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

425. “Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

426. “Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you – alas, it is true of almost every one of us!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

427. “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

428. “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

429. “The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

430. “He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

431. “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

432. “Don’t quarrel with your bread and butter.” “They.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

434. “All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “Lamentations ease the heart only by straining and exacerbating it more and more. Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

439. “That’s just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating – and then he eats you up.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

441. “You see, Rodya, to my thinking, the great thing for getting on in the world is always to keep to the seasons; if you don’t insist on having asparagus in January, you keep your money in your purse!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

442. “He said that those five minutes seemed to him an infinite length of time, an immense richness; it seemed to him that during those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point in thinking about the last moment yet, so he made various allocations: he calculated the time he needed to say goodbye to his companions, and allotted some two minutes to it, then he allotted another two minutes to think about himself for the last time, and then look around him for the last time. He.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

443. “The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

444. “There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

446. “You have only to creep into a secluded corner or into a crocodile, to shut your eyes, and you immediately devise a perfect millennium for mankind.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

447. “And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

448. “But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

449. “Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

450. “I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky