Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Well, let them talk nonsense: perhaps then they’ll talk sense later.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

402. “We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

403. “Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. It’s only that.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

404. “No matter. He is holy. He carries in his heart the secret of renewal for all: that power which will, at last, establish truth on the earth, and all men will be holy and love one another, and there will be no more rich nor poor, no exalted nor humbled, but all will be as the children of God, and the true Kingdom of Christ will come.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

405. “Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

406. “Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

407. “What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

408. “To cook your hare you must first catch it.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

409. “Luxuries are easy to take up but very difficult to give up.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

410. “From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

411. “They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

412. “The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

413. “In a way there’s only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

414. “I’m drunk but truthful.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

415. “Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s souls out of their solitude and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

416. “Man is bound to lie about himself.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

417. “If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

418. “For the secret of human existence lies not only in living, but in knowing what to live for.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

419. “If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. if I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your sins but the sins of others.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

420. “I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness – a real thorough-going illness.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

421. “If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

422. “Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

423. “But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

424. “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

425. “Reality is a thing of infinite diversity, and defies the most ingenious deductions and definitions of abstract thought, nay, abhors the clear and precise classifications in which we so delight. Reality tends to infinite subdivision of things, and truth is a matter of infinite shadings and differentiations.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

426. “In fact, we have lost touch so badly that we often feel a kind of loathing for genuine ‘living live,’ and hence cannot endure being reminded of it. We’ve reached a point where we virtually regard ‘living life’ as hard labor, almost servitude and we all agree in private that it’s much better ’according to books.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

427. “It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

428. “Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

429. “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

430. “To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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