Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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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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Everything seems stupid when it fails.
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I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.
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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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In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.
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Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
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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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I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.
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Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here."
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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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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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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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Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.
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The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot!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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I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction -- if a house is falling upon you, for instance -- one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one's eyes and wait, come what may . . .
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And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
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Without God all things are permitted.
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Only the heart knows how to find what is precious.
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The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
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Men like to to count their troubles; few calculate their happiness.
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The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.
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Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.
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Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.
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Above all, don't lie to yourself.