Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

And again one asks oneself what has one done with one's years. Where have you buried your best days? Have you lived or not?

Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop in these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitration.

Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle...

Des Grieux was like all Frenchmen, that is, cheerful and amiable when it was necessary and profitable, and insufferably dull when the necessity to be cheerful and amiable ceased. A Frenchman is rarely...

Dieses reizende Wesen, diese Sanfte, dieser Himmel voller Seligkeit - war mein Tyrann, der unerträgliche Marterer meiner Seele!

Disbelief in the devil is a French notion, a frivolous notion.

Don't be too anxious on my account. I have but one wish—to be in good health; the tedium is a passing matter, and cheerfulness depends in the last resort upon myself. Human beings have an incredible a...

Each man cannot judge except by himself, he said, blushing. There will be entire freedom when it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live. That is the goal to everything.The goal? But th...

I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying 'we all.' Excuse me, gentleman, but I am no...

I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly.

I mean to say, Krestyan Ivanovich, that I go my own way, a particular way. I'm my own particular man and, as it seems to me, I don't depend on anybody. I also go for walks, Krestyan Ivanovich.

I owe them nothing now, and owe no one anything for ever. They are wicked and I will be wicked. They are cruel and I will be cruel.

I regard you as one of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer while he cuts their entrails out, if only they have found faith or God. Find it and you will live. You have long needed a c...

I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I...I wanted to have the darin...

I sit up talking till daybreak with the young people and we have almost Athenian evenings, Athenian, I mean, only in their intellectual subtlety and refinement.

I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Look how our young people commit suicide, without asking themselves Hamlet’s question what there is beyond, without a sign of such a question, as though all that relates to the soul and to what awaits...