-
Hell is the inability to love.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it’s not true and that it’s blushing just as I am now, all over.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
-
It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
It's easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
-
Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
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 determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Hang your merit. I don't seek anyone's approbation.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
-
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
‘No one but you and one ‘jade’ I have fallen in love with, to my ruin. But being in love doesn’t mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
They won't let me ... I can't be ... good!
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Faith is not in power but in truth.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
-
Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .
Fyodor Dostoevsky -
I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky