Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
-
It's curious and ridiculous how much the gaze of a prudish and painfully chaste man touched by love can sometimes express and that precisely at a moment when the man would of course sooner be glad to fall through the earth than to express anything with a word or a look.
-
I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.
-
How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
-
Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefore no sin, but that there are only hungry people. 'Feed them first and then demand virtue of them!' - that is what they will inscribe on their banner which they will raise against you and which will destroy your temple.
-
It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave.
-
The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.
-
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.
-
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.
-
God knows what lives in me in place of me.
-
Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.
-
Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!
-
If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.
-
There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.
-
It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!
-
You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.
-
If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.
-
Then Christ will say to us, 'Come you also! Come you drunkards! Come you weaklings! Come you depraved!' And he will say to us, 'Vile creatures, you in the image of the beast and you who bear his mark. All the same, you come too!' And the wise and prudent will say, 'Lord, why are you welcoming them? And he will say, 'O wise and prudent, I am welcoming them because not one of them has ever judged himself worthy. And he will stretch out his arms to us, and we shall fall at his feet, and burst into sobs, and then we shall understand everything, everything! Lord, your kingdom come!
-
Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.
-
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.
-
Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.
-
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.
-
With love one can live even without happiness.
-
Everything seems stupid when it fails.
-
My sweetheart! When I think of you, it's as if I'm holding some healing balm to my sick soul, and although i suffer for you, i find that even suffering for you is easy.