Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

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.

And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all.

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.

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

The soul is healed by being with children.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.

I worked it through with pride,I almost spoke without words, and i'm masterly at speaking without words.All my life I have spoken without words, and I have passed through whole tragedies on my own account without words

Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be.

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment ... all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God's will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.

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

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

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

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

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.

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.

Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.

For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.

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.