Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”

“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”

“He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.”

“Loving someone is different from being in love with someone. You can hate someone you're in love with”

“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”

“Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.”

“أصبحتُ فجأةً لا أغضبُ من الناس، بل ما عدتُ ألاحظُ وجودَهم.”

“One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.' How? By what?' By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you'll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul. This has been tested. It is certain... Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one's life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science...in that very moment when you see with horror that despite all your efforts, you not only have not come nearer your goal but seem to have gotten farther from it, at that very moment...you will suddenly reach your goal and will clearly behold over you the wonder-working power of the Lord, who all the while has been loving you, and all the while has been mysteriously guiding you.”

“I must add... my gratitude to you for the attention with which you have listened to me, for, from my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse.”

“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”

“One must be a great man indeed to be able to hold out even against common sense." "Or else a fool.”

“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”

“In all human sorrow nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ's compassion for us no sorrow is trifling.”

“Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!”

“أقسم أيها السادة أن شدة الإدارك مرض – مرض حقيقي خطير”

“And so will I here state just plainly and briefly that I accept God. But I must point out one thing: if God does exist and really created the world, as we well know, he created it according to the principles of Euclidean geometry and made the human brain capable of grasping only three dimensions of space. Yet there have been and still are mathematicians and philosophers-among them some of the most outstanding-who doubt that the whole universe or, to put it more generally, all existence was created to fit Euclidean geometry; they even dare to conceive that two parallel lines that, according to Euclid, never do meet on earth do, in fact, meet somewhere in infinity. And so my dear boy, I’ve decided that I am incapable of understanding of even that much, I cannot possibly understand about God.”

“In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, 's or 's discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty... to those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to mankind. It by no means follows from this, incidentally, that should have the right to kill anyone he pleases, whomever happens along, or to steal from the market every day. Further, I recall developing in my article the idea that all... well, let's say, the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting from the most ancient and going on to the , the , the Muhammads, the , and so forth, that all of them to a man were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new law, they thereby violated the old one, held sacred by society and passed down from their fathers, and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood (sometimes quite innocent and shed valiantly for the ancient law) could help them.”

“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...”

“I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me”

“What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.”