Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
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I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.
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Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
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The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.
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They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.
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They have this social justification for every nasty thing they do!
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There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.
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Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
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Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all–embracing and universal.
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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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In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith.
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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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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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In such situations, of course, people don't nurse their anger silently, they moan aloud; but these are not frank, straightforward moans, there is a kind of cunning malice in them, and that's the whole point. Those very moans express the sufferer's delectation; if he did not enjoy his moans, he wouldn't be moaning.
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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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Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?
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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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There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.
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Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.
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Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.
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Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath forever and yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death.
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Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.
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You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?
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Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?