Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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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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But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet, tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age: I bless the sun's rising each day and my heart sings to it as before, but now I love its setting even more, its long slanting rays, and with them quiet, mild, tender memories, dear images from the whole of a long and blessed life--and over all is God's truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!
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Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.
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Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are.
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I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.
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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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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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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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It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
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One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!
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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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It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!
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As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.
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Life is in ourselves and not in the external.
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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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Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don't want millions, but an answer to their questions.
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Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance.... Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do.... It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.
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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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Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.
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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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They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
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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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The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.