Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

“If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself.”

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

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

“Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.”

“I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.”

“Reason is a fine thing, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life.”

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.”

“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”

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

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

“I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.”

“The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.”

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

“Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honour those whom they have tortured to death.”

“Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea.”

“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.”

“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”

“Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful.”

“Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ.”