Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

Feeling my own humiliation in my heart like the sharp prick of a needle.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.

There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for...

Fyodor Pavlovich learned of his wife’s death when he was drunk; it was said that he ran out into the street with his hands raised to heaven in joy, shouting: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant…’;* ot...

I'm now asking an idle question of my own: which is better--cheap happiness, or lofty suffering? Well, which is better?

The men of those days...were absolutely not the same people that we are now; it was not the same race as now, in our age, really, it seems we are a different species...In those days they were men of o...

It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it wa...

If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at le...

Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water.

Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves someti...

It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me. What if He doesn't exist? What if Rakitin's right -that it's an idea made up by men? Then, if He doesn't exist, man is the king o...

I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.

My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we really are: we are absurd, frivol...

Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists--and I mean not only the good ones--for there are many good ones...

In place of the clear and rigid ancient law, You [oh Lord] made man decide about good and evil for himself, with no other guidance than Your example. But did it never occur to You that man would disre...

Beside himself with shame and despair, the utterly ruined though perfectly just Mr. Golyadkin dashed headlong away, wherever fate might lead him; but with every step he took, with every thud of his fo...

It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated...

originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.

Sou um sonhador, mal conheço a vida real, e um momento como este é tão raro de ser conseguido por mim, que me seria absolutamente impossível não continuar a evocá-lo sempre em meus sonhos.

I, for example, quiet plainly and simply insist upon annihilation for myself. No, they say, you must go on living, for without you there would be nothing. If everything on earth were reasonable, nothi...