Inspirational Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”
“You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
“It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.”
“One can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan't understand them thoroughly.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from The Idiot
“It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from The Idiot
“Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth.”
“I love, I can only love the one I've left behind, stained with my blood when, ungrateful wretch that I am, I extinguished myself and shot myself through the heart. But never, never have I ceased to love that one, and even on the night I parted from him I loved him perhaps more poignantly than ever. We can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. I want and thirst this very minute to kiss , with tears streaming down my cheeks, this one and only I have left behind. I don't want and won't accept any other. ”
“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness.”
topics: conscious , disease , fyodor-dostoyevsky , illness , intellect , notes-from-the-underground , reason
“Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.”
topics: secret
“Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?”
“Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.”
“Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor”
“What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky ,
from Crime and Punishment
“The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it”
“It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.”
“Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!”
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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.