Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from The Idiot
“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.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Demons
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”
“But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.”
“an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”
“What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have come to be where you are," he said; "I can't help it.”
topics: kindlehighlight
“If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”
“People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from The Gambler
topics: friendship
“The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”
“There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.”
topics: freedom-of-conscience
“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.”
“I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.”
“I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.”
“The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love. ”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from The Idiot
“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people--that's in your hands.”
topics: kindlehighlight
Group of Brands
© 2026 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
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.