Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

It is better to be with God and be wrong, than to be with men and be right

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart

Laziness is the mother of all vices

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness

Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy; only because of that

I say it seriously, poverty is not a vice. That's a truism, and yet I understand why my heart could not stand it.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid

To live without hope is to cease to live

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular

Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time

The darker the night, the brighter the stars; the deeper the grief, the closer is God

What can be done if the man has not the strength of character to be able to stick to the truth even when he knows it?

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison

You need only one thing: change your own consciousness, and the world will change with you

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment, as well as prison

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for

Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth

The mystery of human existence is not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for

We are all responsible for all

A true act, a perfect, genuine, and complete act, is always precisely unexpected to the most expert calculator

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's

Talking nonsense is not only permissible but even necessary sometimes

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

Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also?

I assure you, gentlemen, that in a man’s life moments occur when his intellect grows confused, and his heart stands still

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was ‘sublime and beautiful,’ the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it.

The secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most

I became aware of my own ugliness, and in doing so, I looked at others in quite a different light

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of things left unsaid

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God

You are all afraid of one another because each of you is more afraid of being laughed at than anything else

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others

If there is no God, everything is permitted

Above all, don’t be bitter; it will be your ruin.

Raskolnikov, after all, is a man of action—whether you like it or not—a man who knows no horror, has no doubts and whose mind is made up

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms

And what does it matter to me that this is agreed upon by human convention, and that the whole of mankind thinks so too? I want to live for my own sake, not for others

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken

If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself

The soul is healed by being with children

Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart

At first art imitates life. Then life will imitate art. Then life will find its very existence from the arts

A hundred suspicions don't make a proof

I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, in love with suffering

The soul is healed by being with children

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity

Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice

The world will be saved by beauty

A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals

I want to say something about the kind of love that exists only between companions in misfortune

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half

There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings

Reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the reasoning ability of man, while will is a manifestation of the whole of life

People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts; a beast could never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel

The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful

There is in man a need to bow down before something, otherwise, he will worship idols

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons

What is honour, gentlemen? I ask you, what is honour?

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else

A curious thing, people are only repelled by rudeness and bad manners, never by cruelty or torture

Above all, don't lie to yourself

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness

Man is broad, too broad. I'd have him narrower

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man

It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them—the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel