Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

I remembered you, my brother, and all yours; at the last minute you, you alone, were in my mind, and it was only then that I realized how much I love you, my dearest brother!

I understand solidarity in sin among men; solidarity in retribution I also understand; but what solidarity in sin do little children have? ...And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum o...

I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!

I've found out more in this one cursed night than I'd have learned in twenty years of living.

I've made a terrible confession to you, he concluded gloomily. Do appreciate it, gentlemen. And it's not enough, not enough to appreciate it, you must not just appreciate it, it should also be preciou...

I've tested my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that, in order to know myself. This testing for myself, and for show, proved it to be boundless, as before all my life. In front of your very e...

I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf.

If there is no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and therefore everything is permitted.

In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterm...

It is a year and eight months since I last looked at these notes of mine. I do so now only because, being overwhelmed with depression, I wish to distract my mind by reading them through at random. I l...

It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labour ever cured a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offenc...

It is curious that this man who, even in my childhood, made such an impression upon me, who had such a crucial influence on the whole bent of my mind, and who perhaps has even cast his shadow over the...

It must be true that the whole second half of a man's life is most often made up only of habits accumulated during the first half.

It's always worthwhile speaking to a clever man.

It's precisely their diseases that people pride themselves on, and I do-more perhaps than anybody else. Let's not argue; my objection was absurd. But that aside, I am firmly convinced that not only ex...

It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. With one reservation: I have a childlike conviction that...

I’ll always come to see you, all my life, Alyosha answered firmly.

I’ve alway been struck by how little adults understand children, even their own fathers and mothers. Nothing should be kept from children on the pretext that they’re little and it’s too soon for them...

Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.

Just try to suppose that I may not know how to behave with dignity. That is, perhaps I'm a dignified man, but I don't know how to behave with dignity. Do you understand that it may be so? All Russians...