Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.

Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions -- it's like a dream.

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.

Every ant  knows the  formula of its ant-hill, every  bee knows  the formula  of its  beehive. They know it  in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth.

For I love the empress of my soul. I love and I cannot but love. You yourself see the whole of me. I shall fly to her, fall down before her: you were right to walk past me.. farewell and forget your victim, never trouble yourself more!

Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.

If God does not exist, everything is permitted.

God knows what lives in me in place of me.

For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.'

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.

Catch several hares and you won't catch one.

You're a gentleman, they used to say to him. You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman.

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!

There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?

When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness,... then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift... every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.

And it is so simple... The one thing is -- love thy neighbor as thyself -- that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.

Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

To strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering -- that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.

I am crazy about mysterious things.

Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid.

I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft tender gentle memories that come with them...' -Father Zossima.

A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

Every man needs a place to go to.

Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.

I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom -- God man or man God.

Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.

When reason fails, the devil helps!

What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?

And in fact you're not like everyone else: you weren't ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment.

Right attitudes produces right action.

There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.

That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating -- and then he eats you up.

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

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.

They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

May you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?

Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.

That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.

Don't think I'm talking nonsense because I'm drunk. I'm not a bit drunk. Brandy's all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.

Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable, but desirable. They mean growth. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall.

Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!

Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.

To cook your hare you must first catch it.

Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.

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

You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it-which is what matters most.

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.

Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.

Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.

Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?

Remember that you must never sell your soul. Never accept payment in advance.... Never give a work to the printer before it is finished. This is the worst thing you can do.... It constitutes the murder of your own ideas.

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

After all, bluff and real emotion exist so easily side by side.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.

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 daring...and I killed her.

Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we...yes, I assure you...we should be begging to be under control again at once.

If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things.

I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness -- a real thorough-going illness.

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.

Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.

An anguish of longing would boil up inside me; a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts would appear, and I would embark on dissipations.

Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.