Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“And then, however limited his sphere, he still preserves in his bosom the sweet feeling of liberty, and knows that he can quit his prison whenever he likes.”
“man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.”
“On awaking Oyvind looked around to find them all gone; then he remembered the day before, and the burning, cruel pain in his heart began at once. “This, I shall never be rid of again,” thought he; and there came over him a feeling of indifference, as though his whole future had dropped away from him.”
“My bones were buried by Octavian. I am Virgilius; and for no crime else Did I lose heaven, than for not having faith;”
“Serlo himself loved music much: he used to maintain, that a player without taste for it never could attain a distinct conception and feeling of the scenic art. "As a man performs," he would observe, "with far more ease and dignity, when his gestures are accompanied and guided by a tune; so the player ought, in idea as it were, to set to music even his prose parts, that he may not monotonously slight them over in his individual style, but treat them in suitable alternation by time and measure.”
“Thou'rt wise, and knowest better than I speak." And as he is, who unwills what he willed, And by new thoughts doth his intention change, So that from his design he quite withdraws,”
“Only half a word that is to the point can kindle laughter under such circumstances, and especially when it is dangerous to laugh.”
“not by gunpowder but by those who invented it would matters be settled.”
“Love naturally begins in secresy because it begins in shyness; but it must live openly because it lives in joy. It is as when the leaves are changing; that which is to grow cannot conceal itself, and in every instance you see that all which is dry falls from the tree the moment the new leaves begin to sprout.”
“To the unblushing womankind of Florence To go about displaying breast and paps.”
“Nor have you a child in the house any longer, either,” said the school-master. The mother knew what he meant. “Oyvind has not been happy of late,” said she. “Ah, no! he who is ambitious never is happy,” — and he gazed up with an old man’s calmness into God’s peaceful heavens above.”
“my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.”
“If it seemeth to thee that thou knowest many things, and understandest them well, know also that there are many more things which thou knowest not.”
“In her view the aim of every religion was merely to preserve certain proprieties while affording satisfaction to human desires”
“I don’t want every one to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.”
“Napoleon's historian Thiers, like other of his historians, trying to justify his hero says that he was drawn to the walls of Moscow against his will. He is as right as other historians who look for the explanation of historic events in the will of one man; he is as right as the Russian historians who maintain that Napoleon was drawn to Moscow by the skill of”
“We should daily repeat to ourselves," I exclaimed, "that we should not interfere with our friends, unless to leave them in possession of their own joys, and increase their happiness by sharing it with them!”
“A good chessplayer having lost a game is sincerely convinced that his loss resulted from a mistake he made and looks for that mistake in the opening, but forgets that at each stage of the game there were similar mistakes and that none of his moves were perfect. He only notices the mistake to which he pays attention, because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more complex than this is the game of war, which occurs under certain limits of time, and where it is not one will that manipulates lifeless objects, but everything results from innumerable conflicts of various wills!”
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.