Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.
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People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
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Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.
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With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath.
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A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.
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Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.
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Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.
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He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.
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And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
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For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!
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God is the pain of the fear of death.
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Originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
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There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
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The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly.
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Oh I've plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.
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...one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.
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Who doesn't desire his fathers death?
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Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!
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The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.
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It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated.
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It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!
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It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.
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One must love life before loving its meaning ... yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
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When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness,... then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift... every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.