Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave”

“And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?”

“We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.”

“لم أعبث إلا نصف عبث، لم أمزح إلا نصف مزاح .”

“...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.”

“الإنسان متى جلس على عرش الملك فقد صار عبداً ومتى أدرك الناس أعماق روحه فقد طوى كتاب حياته ومتى بلغ أوج كماله فقد قضي نحبه بل هو كالثمرة إذا نضجت سقطت واندثرت”

“I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.”

“I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.”

“At some thoughts one stands perplexed - especially at the sight of men's sin - and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that, once and for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.”

“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”

“Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which is money.”

“Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet - and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him - and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity - it would be better to live so than die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how - only to live! ...How true! Lord, how true! Man is a scoundrel! And he's a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel for that.”

“It was all quite natural, human beings are created in order to torment one another.”

“I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.”

“La mentira es el único privilegio del hombre sobre todos los animales" - Crimen y Castigo”

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”

“The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging this new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: 'No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectations, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.”

“وما الذكري سوى ورقة خريف لا ترتعش فى الهواء هنيهة حتى تُكّفن بالتراب دهراً”

“Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers.”

“The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.”