Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

“Nobody dies of hysterics, though. They don’t matter. God gave woman hysterics as a relief.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“He had said,”Mother, my little heart, in truth we are each responsible to all for all, it’s only that men don’t know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Complete Novels

“Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men — men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“They have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man’s being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“To transform the world, to recreate it afresh, men must turn into another path psychologically. Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to every one, brotherhood will not come to pass.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man,”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“But what do you say to this argument (help me with it): ghosts are, as it were, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“¿Qué sabe la razón? La razón sabe únicamente lo que ha alcanzado a saber (y hay cosas que quizá nunca llegue a saber; lo cual no es un consuelo, pero ¿por qué no decirlo con franqueza?), mientras que la naturaleza humana actúa siempre como un todo, con todo aquello que lleva en sí, consciente e inconscientemente, y aunque puede desbarrar, vive no obstante”.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“I think everyone should love life above everything in the world." "Love life more than the meaning of it?" "Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it. I have thought so a long time.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“A big clumsy sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall and half the floor space of the room; it was once covered with chintz, but was now in rags and served Raskolnikov as a bed. Often he went to sleep on it, as he was, without undressing, without sheets, wrapped in his old student's overcoat, with his head on one little pillow, under which he heaped up all the linen he had, clean and dirty, by way of a bolster.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“In an English satire of the last century, Gulliver, returning from the land of the Lilliputians where the people were only three or four inches high, had grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant among them, that as he walked along the streets of London he could not help crying out to carriages and passers-by to be careful and get out of his way for fear he should crush them, imagining that they were little and he was still a giant. He was laughed at and abused for it, and rough coachmen even lashed at the giant with their whips.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“creative genius was already showing, it was gathering strength and taking shape. But the moment of embodiment and creation was still far off, perhaps very far off, perhaps altogether impossible!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Complete Novels

“But I suppose they do not know that innocence is strong through its very innocence, that the shamelessness, the insolence and the revolting familiarity of some persons, sooner or later gains the stigma of universal contempt; and that such persons come to ruin through nothing but their own worthlessness and the corruption of their own hearts.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Complete Novels

“the wolf will have to pay for the sheep’s tears.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Complete Novels

“Surely,” thought I, “we mortals who dwell in pain and sorrow might with reason envy the birds of heaven which know not either!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Complete Novels

“And that we are all responsible to all for all,”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Complete Novels

“You boast of consciousness, but you are not sure of your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is darkened and corrupt, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Every one will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it’s useless for him to repine at life’s being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the grave’... and so on and so on in the same style. Charming!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man, and that will only be understood among us.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“From those questions alone, from the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal. For in those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“They have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man’s being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“Give one hour a week to it in spite of your poverty, only one little hour. And you will see for yourselves that our people is gracious and grateful, and will repay you a hundred-fold.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, that approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“Beggars, especially genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves, but to ask for charity through the newspapers. One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“am convinced that he did that from ‘self-laceration,’from the self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels