Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
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The world will be saved by beauty.
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Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.
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I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.
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My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.
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Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.
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When reason fails, the devil helps!
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Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
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The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
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There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
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I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.
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Hang your merit. I don't seek anyone's approbation.
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I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart - my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.
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Why count the days, when even one days is enough for a man to know all happiness?
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I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, i don't know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine. What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine.
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Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.
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It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.
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If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.
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It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.
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If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.
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They won't let me ... I can't be ... good!
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He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.
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Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.
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In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.