Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
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If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man ... just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.
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Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.
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... people only count their misfortunes; their good luck they take no account of. But if they were to take everything into account, as they should, they'd find that they had their fair share of it.
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But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.
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For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.
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Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
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Life [had] replaced logic.
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Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!
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..., twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
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If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.
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I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.
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I swear to you, sirs, that excessive consciousness is a disease--a genuine, absolute disease.
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Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the 'wee ones,' because there are little children and big children. All people are 'wee ones.' And I'll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.
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I walked along Nevsky Avenue.Actually it was more torture, humiliation, and bilious irritation than a stroll.
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I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom - God man or man God.
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Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.
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Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!
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You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.
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And you're sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes - you're sorry, for you didn't even have time to fall in love.
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There is no virtue if there is no immortality.
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How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?
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And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .
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I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.
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You know, my boy, he said, it's impossible to love men such as they are. And yet we must. So try to do good to men by doing violence to your feelings, holding your nose, and shutting your eyes, especially shutting your eyes. Endure their villainy without anger, as much as possible; try to remember that you're a man too. For, if you're even a little above average intelligence, you'll have the propensity to judge people severely. Men are vile by nature and they'd rather love out of fear. Don't give in to such love: despise it always.