Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

I experienced, moreover, one form of suffering which is perhaps the sharpest, the most painful that can be experienced in a house of detention cut off from law and liberty. I mean forced association....

I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.

I had come there not only to look at, but also to number myself sincerely and wholeheartedly with, the mob. As for my secret moral views, I had no room for them amongst my actual, practical opinions.

I hated them horribly, though perhaps I was worse than any of them. They repaid me in the same way, and did not conceal their aversion for me. But by then I did not desire their affection: on the cont...

I have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through moral...

I have mentioned already, by the way, that though he lost his mother in his fourth year he remembered her all his life—her face, her caresses, as though she stood living before me. Such memories may p...

I have noticed that in a cramped space one's thoughts too tend to be cramped.

I have sometimes thought that if ever I return home, I shall get more grief than joy from my impressions there. I have not lived your life, and much in it is unknown to me, and indeed, no one can real...

I heard exactly the same thing, a long time ago to be sure, from a doctor, the elder remarked. He was then an old man, and unquestionably intelligent. He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but...

I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!

I left proud, but with my spirit crushed.

I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful hatred-that hate which is only a hair's-breath from love, from the maddest love!

I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he...

I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience.

I really feel obliged to go to this confounded luncheon.

I remember being told of a poor wretch I once knew, who had died of hunger. I was almost beside myself with rage! I believe if I could have resuscitated him I would have done so for the sole purpose o...

I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.

I speak as a judge and I know that I was guilty. Even in the whirl in which I was caught up, and though I was alone without a guide or counsellor, I was, I swear, conscious of my downfall, and so ther...

I suppose that’s a Slavophile idea.’ ‘No: today’s Slavophiles would disown it. These days the people have grown more intelligent. But you went even further: you believed that Roman Catholicism was no...

I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be gr...