Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

“. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .”

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

“Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remai...”

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”

“Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow ever...”

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

“And so these refined parents rejected their five-year-old girl to all kinds of torture. They beat her, kicked her, flogged her, for no reason that they themselves knew of. The child’s whole body was covered in bruises. Eventually they devised a new refinement. Under the pretext that the child dirtie...”

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”

“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”

“There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.”

“Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!”

“If there is no God, everything is permitted.”

“Realists do not fear the results of their study.”

“A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.”

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”

“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”

“Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy.”

“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives...”

“I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread th...”

“Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.”

“Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic.”

“What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their orig...”

“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.”

“No, it is not a commonplace, sir! If up to now, for example, I have been told to 'love my neighbor,' and I did love him, what came of it?. . . What came of it was that I tore my caftan in two, shared it with my neighbor, and we were both left half naked, in accordance with the Russian proverb which...”

“What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be.”

“The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.”

“Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand...”

“The soul is healed by being with children.”

“Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobri...”

“And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And...”

“Without God all things are permitted.”

“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.”

“For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.”

“Demons have faith, but they tremble.”

“Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.”

“It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

“There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”

“Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.”

“The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.”

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

“If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.”

“A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.”

“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”

“To live without Hope is to Cease to live.”

“In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you're bound to grow out of your old ideals; they're smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from t...”

“Jeżeli ludzkość bez wyjątku raz wyrzeknie się Boga (...), to sam przez się, bez ludożerstwa, upadnie cały stary światopogląd, przede wszystkim zaś, cała stara moralność, i nastąpi wszystko nowe. Ludzie zjednoczą się, by wziąć od życia wszystko, co ono dać może dla szczęścia i radości na jednym tylko...”

“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...”

“One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.”

“My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?”

“Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.”

“Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.”

“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.”

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”

“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”

“It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?”