Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self – forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.
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Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!
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I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child's tormentor: 'Just art thou, O Lord!' but I do not want to cry out with them. While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!
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Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison.
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I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.
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What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
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God knows what lives in me in place of me.
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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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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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Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.
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But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.
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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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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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Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
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The jealous are the readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it.
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Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.
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If there is no God, then I am God.
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There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.
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I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.
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Everything seems stupid when it fails.
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Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
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What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
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In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.
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I've always considered myself smarter than everyone around me, and sometimes, believe me, I've been ashamed of it. At the least, all my life I've looked away and never could look people straight in the eye.