If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.
If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point that you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all; go at once and seek to...
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've found out more in this one cursed night than I'd have learned in twenty years of living.
I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I
I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.
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 swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness--a real thorough-going illness. For
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 grieve for my little son, father, for my little son.
I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake...
I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a crimina...
I am an inveterate buffoon, and been from birth up, your reverence, it's as though it were a craze in me. I dare say it's a devil within me. But only a little one. A more serious one would have chosen...
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.
Here was a small corner of the Greek archipelago; sky-blue, caressing waves, islands and rocks, a flowering strip of coastline, a magical panorama in the distance, an inviting sunset — you can’t descr...
He vividly recalled those old doubts and perplexities, and it seemed to him that it was no mere chance that he recalled them now. It struck him as strange and grotesque, that he should have stopped at...
He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some images without order or coherence floated before his mind--faces of people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom...
He doesn't love anyone, and maybe he never will.
He could not pass by children without his soul being shaken: such is the man.
FYODOR MIKHAYLOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of a physician’s seven children. When