Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Quotes

• “Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may ma...”
• “(Who are some of the writers you enjoy reading and re-reading?) SK: Dostoevsky and Simon De Beauvoir. Since I was a youn...”
• “Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he wo...”
• “Ivan Karamazov ... does not absolutely deny the existence of God. He refutes Him in the name of a moral value. ... God, ...”
• “How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me...”
• “They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each o...”
• “And what is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I'd say, is to develop in man a capacity to feel a g...”
• “The Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book. Readers who know what it is about may find this an intolerably whimsical statem...”
• “All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task,...”
• “Once it's been proved to you that you're descended from an ape, it's no use pulling a face; just accept it. Once they've...”
• “It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neit...”
• “Throughout the nineteenth century you can find writers using brothers and sisters as ways of projecting different aspect...”
• “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. ...”
• “I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart - my heart, and not my head; and I had...”
• “It was evident that he revived by fits and starts. He would suddenly come to himself from actual delirium for a few minu...”
• “Attributed to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in self-help books and on social media. The words are from an untitled ...”
• “Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefor...”
• “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsk...”
• “Ivan is the incarnation of the refusal to be the only one saved. He throws in his lot with the damned and, for their sak...”
• “On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other so...”
• “People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be ...”
• “To study the meaning of man and of life - I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a myster...”
• “The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds, and between them fathomless black patches. Sudd...”
• “If I seem happy to you . . . You could never say anything that would please me more. For men are made for happiness, and...”
• “In the preface to an anthology of Russian literature, Vladimir Nabokov stated that he had not found a single page of Dos...”
• “Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to the man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in hi...”
• “I have never in my life met a man like him for noble simplicity, and boundless truthfulness. I understood from the way h...”
• “Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hi...”
• “Variant translation. Last Notebook (1880-1881), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 83: 696; as quoted in Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoe...”
• “Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is ...”
• “For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the for...”
• “Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is ...”
• “But,' I [Dmitri Karamazov] asked, 'how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is p...”
• “Variants of such a statement have also been attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche, but the on...”
• “The testimony of Dostoevsky is relevant to this problem - Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I h...”
• “If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life o...”
• “I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came up...”
• “There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man c...”
• “The stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artle...”
• “Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole voca...”
• “All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it...”
• “Letter to his Niece Sofia Alexandrovna, Geneva, January 1, 1868. Ethel Golburn Mayne, Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Do...”
• “... people only count their misfortunes; their good luck they take no account of. But if they were to take everything in...”
• “Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of Dostoevsky: the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist ...”
• “Jorge Luis Borges, in his Preface to Dostoevsky's Demons as translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Borges's "A Personal Libr...”
• “Even Dostoyevski, the great seer, the highest point of the nineteenth century, could not ward off the devils that prompt...”
• “Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quali...”
• “Letter to Katkov, the reactionary editor of The Moscow Herald, in which The Brothers Karamazov was serialized. As quoted...”
• “The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks...”
• “Letter to Mme. N. D. Fonvisin (1854), as published in Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Frien...”