Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“the most offensive is not their lying—one can always forgive lying—lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth—what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying…”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“One man doesn't believe in god at all, while the other believes in him so thoroughly that he prays as he murders men!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from The Idiot
“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
“In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.”
“It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!”
topics: the-insulted-and-humiliated
“Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
topics: death
“In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Demons
“To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.”
“All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.”
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“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.”
“هل تعرف مدى السحر الذي يمكن أن تستسلم له إمرأة تحب ؟”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.”
“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.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Netochka Nezvanova
“Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
topics: kindlehighlight
“Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from The Idiot
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.