Top 500 Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

403. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

405. “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

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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

409. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

411. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

414. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

430. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

448. “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

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

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

450. “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