Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave.
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Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.
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A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
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But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
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Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.
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What matters," said the prince at last, "is that you have a child's trusting nature and extraordinary truthfulness. Do you know that a great deal can be forgiven you for that alone?
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Trifles, trifles are what matter!
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A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
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I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.
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You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.
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Man is bound to lie about himself.
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At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts.
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If the person laughs well, they are a good person.
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God is necessary, and therefore must exist...But I know that he does not and cannot exist...Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?
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They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
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My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.
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But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.
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I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.
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To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.
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I don't need money, or, better, it's not money that I need; it's not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over!
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The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.
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I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.
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The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three...And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere!
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Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.