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Dostoevsky Quotes

Browse 47 quotes about Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky Quotes

“(...) grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding in the fact that there is no one even got you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps will never have, an object of your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache.”

SadnessDespairDepressionSpiteAcheDostoevskyDisquiet
Book:Notes from Underground
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“and—and is it really impossible to be unhappy? Oh, what are my grief and my trouble, if I am able to be happy? You know, I don’t understand how it’s possible to pass by a tree and not be happy to see it. To talk with a man and not be happy that you love him! Oh, I only don’t know how to say it... but there are so many things at every step that are so beautiful, that even the most confused person finds beautiful. Look at a child, look at God’s sunrise, look at the grass growing, look into the eyes that are looking at you and love you...”

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Book:The Idiot
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“St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.”

SoulVirtueAugustineDostoevsky
Book:In Job's Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths
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“Car peu d'entre nous savent ce qu'il peut y avoir d'infiniment patient, de commisération et d'indulgence sans bornes dans certains coeurs féminins. D'immenses trésors de sympathie, de consolation, d'espérance reposent dans ces coeurs purs, si souvent blessés eux aussi, car un coeur qui aime beaucoup souffre beaucoup, mais qui dissimulent soigneusement leur blessure aux regards indiscrets, car le chagrin profond le plus souvent se tait et se cache.”

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Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“Tell me, how is it that we can’t all be like brothers together? Why is it that even the best of men always seem to hide something from other people and to keep something back? Why not say straight out what is in one’s heart, when one knows that one is not speaking idly? As it is every one seems harsher than he really is, as though all were afraid of doing injustice to their feelings, by being too quick to express them.”

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Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“I am in the native land of hypocrite sir! These men and women of principles; I loathe them. I can scorn at a man disdainfully and forget him. Man is filth, sir! he is dutibound to be filthy. While I believe women are chaste, these principles they confine themselves to make them indelicate and hateful. A beautiful woman sir! Stupefying beauty should not be sole possession of one rodent. God created beauty or maybe he did not, but in it's most primitive state, it belonged to everyman before these principles; these God forsaken principles plagued us. Do you believe in God sir? Oh you do! I can tell that by your expression. Sir! God is not of principles, if he were, world would be just. And I belive, no; actually i know God isn't of principles because He will punish me for years for just one glass; this one glass of wine, you bought me, whereas I deserve far lesser punishment. It is empty sir! I can see the bottom of the glass and depth of my wretchedness in this glass. Perhaps another time sir! I am drunk now, and I don't want to squander this temporal leave.”

GodSinBeautySorrowWineWomanUnjustWretchednessDostoevsky
Author:Teufel Damon
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“Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but where is there any mirth in our time, and do people know how to be mirthful?... A man's mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how we weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man.”

CharacterLaughterMirthDostoevsky
Book:The Adolescent
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“In an enchanting encounter with the myriad books that I met in a cosy book shop today, I couldn't help but get bedazzled with the cornucopia of stories and poetry that lay snuggled in the plethora of shelves at display. You wouldn't believe it dear readers that I heard a real symphony in my ears at that very moment of this august encounter that happened in November. There was no rain today but the bright and sunny spirit of the day was as magical as any rainy day might have made me feel. I do not know about the other people in the book shop, but to me that very moment felt as if I was on cloud nine. Proverbially it felt as if I was listening with a mellifluous ecstasy to the magic of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. At that exact moment when I lay my hands or rather I would say I grabbed my hands on the two books that I have been yearning to read since a long time, I guess the entire Universe paused. Now without having an iota of energy within me to any other further delay in experiencing the magic and in experiencing the mad euphoria that has serenaded my entire being, I take your leave my dearest readers to indulge myself and in the most pleasurable way possible with the words of Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky.”

ReadingLiteratureBooksLife Quotes And SayingsReading BooksBook LoversReading And WritingKafkaDostoevskyDiary Of A Writer
Author:Avijeet Das
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“Impossible crimes! But I assure you that just such crimes, and perhaps still more awful ones, have existed in the past and at all times, and not only among us but everywhere, and, in my opinion, will occur again and again for a very long time. The only difference is that there was much less publicity in Russian in the old days, while now people have begun to talk and even to write of such cases, so that it seems as though these criminals were a recent phenomenon.”

SocietyMediaCrimeNewsDostoevskySensationalism
Book:The Idiot
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“Natasha and I used to go for walks in the orchard, and beyond that, there was a vast dank forest, where we once got lost… Unforgettable, golden days! Life was just beginning to assert itself, mysteriously and alluringly – and it was a sweet experience. It seemed then that behind every bush, every tree, some mysterious and unknowable being lurked; the fairy-tale world merged into the real one, and when the evening mist thickened in the deep valleys and its grey, sinuous wisps reached out towards the brambles clinging to the rocky ridges of our great gorge, Natasha and I would stand hand in hand on the edge, peering with bated breath into the depths, expecting at any moment to see someone emerge or call out to us from the mist at the bottom and turn our nursery stories into manifest reality.”

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Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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“You know it's a matter of a whole lifetime, an infinite multitude of ramifications hidden from us. The most skillful chess-player, the cleverest of them, can only look a few moves ahead... How many moves there are in this, and how much that is unknown to us! In scattering the seed, scattering your "charity," your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another... On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form. He who has received them from you will hand them on to another. And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity?”

LifeCharityServicePhilanthropyAltruismDostoevskyCause Driven Life
Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.”

LiteratureEducationBooksStandardsShakespeareNovelsSchool SystemJoyceDanteTolstoyDostoevskyCommon CoreSchool ReformTolstoi
Author:Anthony Esolen
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“O Nastenka, Nastenka ! Savez-vous que vous m'avez, et pour longtemps, réconcilié avec moi-même? Savez-vous que, dorénavant, je ne penserai plus autant de mal de moi, comme cela m'arrivait de le faire ? Savez-vous que, peut-être, je cesserai de souffrir d'avoir commis un crime, un péché dans ma vie, parce qu'une vie comme la mienne est un crime, un péché ? Et ne croyez pas que j'exagère quoi que ce soit, au nom du ciel, ne croyez pas cela, Nastenka, parce que je vis parfois des minutes d'une souffrance telle, oh, d'une souffrance... Parce que je commence à croire dans ces minutes que je ne serai jamais capable de commencer à vivre une vraie vie [...]”

AmourVieWhite NightsDostoevskySouffranceDostoievskiNuits Blanches
Book:Les Nuits blanches / Le Sous-sol
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“Le jour d'aujourd'hui fut triste, pluvieux, sans éclaircie, un peu comme ma vieillesse future. Des pensées si étranges m'oppressent, des sensations si sombres, des questions qui me restent encore si obscures s'amassent dans ma tête, et, je ne sais pas, je n'ai pas la force, pas le désir de les résoudre. Ce n'est pas à moi de résoudre tout cela! Aujourd'hui, nous ne nous verrons pas. Hier, quand nous nous sommes quittés, les nuages commençaient à recouvrir le ciel, et le brouillard montait. Je lui dis qu'il allait faire mauvais le lendemain; elle ne répondit rien; elle ne voulait rien dire contre elle-même; pour elle, ce jour était brillant et clair, pas un nuage ne devait voiler son bonheur.”

White NightsDostoevskyNuits BlanchesNuages
Book:Les Nuits blanches / Le Sous-sol
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“— Attendre quoi ? Comment ? — Je l'aime; mais ça passera, ça doit passer, ça ne peut pas ne pas passer; ça passe déjà, je le sens... Comment savoir ? Peut-être ce sera fini aujourd'hui même, parce que je le déteste, parce qu'il s'est moqué de moi, alors que vous, vous avez pleuré avec moi, ici, parce que vous ne m'avez pas rejetée, comme lui, parce que vous m'aimez, et lui, il ne m'aime pas, parce que, moi aussi, à la fin, je vous aime... Oui ! je vous aime ! je vous aime comme vous m'aimez; et je vous l'ai dit moi-même, la première, vous l'avez entendu - et si je vous aime, c'est que vous êtes mieux que lui, que vous êtes plus honnête que lui, c'est parce que lui, lui, lui... La pauvre petite était tellement émue qu'elle ne ter- mina pas sa phrase, elle posa sa tête sur mon épaule, puis sur ma poitrine, et elle pleura amèrement. Je la consolais, j'essayais de lui parler, mais elle n'arrivait pas à s'arrêter; elle ne faisait que me serrer la main et me disait, au milieu de ses sanglots: "Attendez, attendez; je vais arrêter, tout de suite ! Je veux vous dire.. ne croyez pas que ces larmes... ce n'est rien, une faiblesse, attendez, ça va passer..." A la fin, elle cessa, sécha ses larmes et nous nous remîmes à marcher. Je voulais parler, mais elle me demanda encore longtemps d'attendre. Nous nous tûmes... A la fin, elle rassembla tout son courage et se mit à parler...”

AmourWhite NightsDostoevskyPleurerNuits Blanches
Book:Les Nuits blanches / Le Sous-sol
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“Mes nuits s'achevèrent ce matin. Un jour sinistre. La pluie tombait, elle battait tristement mes carreaux; il faisait sombre dans ma chambre ; gris dehors. J'avais mal à la tête, le vertige; la fièvre me parcourait le corps. — Une lettre pour toi, mon bon monsieur, par la poste urbaine, le facteur vient de passer, murmura Matriona au-dessus de moi. — Une lettre ! de qui ? m'écriai-je, bondissant de ma chaise. — Ben j'en sais rien, mon bon monsieur, peut-être que c'est écrit dessus... Je brisai le cachet. Une lettre d'elle !”

AmourWhite NightsDostoevskyLettreNuits Blanches
Book:Les Nuits blanches / Le Sous-sol
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“Ascoltate, perchè non siamo tutti come fratelli gli uni per gli altri? Perchè anche la persona migliore nasconde sempre qualcosa all'altro e non gliene parla? Perchè non dire francamente, subito, quello che si ha nel cuore, se si che le nostre parole non saranno dette al vento? Invece ognuno appare per così dire più burbero di quanto non sia effettivamente, come se tutti avessero paura di fare torto ai propri sentimenti se li esternassero troppo in fretta...”

LoveFeelingsItalianoWhite NightsDostoevskyLe Notti Bianche
Author:Dostoevsky F.
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“But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are laughing- no, you are not laughing, you are angry again. You are forever angry, all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine”

LifeSoulDevilDeliriumDostoevskyIvanIvan KaramazovKaramazov Brothers
Book:The Brothers Karamazov
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“So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course… but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it?”

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Book:The Brothers Karamazov
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“The waves of liberation movements from the 1960s have disenchanted us vis à vis ‘old-fashioned’ restrictive values but have also forced upon us new codes of thought and behaviour, summarised in the clumsy phrase ‘political correctness’ and the morality of uncritical respect for difference and diversity. (I lazily say ‘us’ and, of course, this is not true for everyone.) We have learned from psychoanalysis that whatever is repressed will emerge projectively later or elsewhere, often in even more virulent forms. Hence, in recent years we have seen waves of paedophile scandals, celebrated cannibal cases, serial murders, school shootings and mass murders committed by terrorists. The naivety of the nice peaceful Left runs parallel to the converse unbridled greed of bankers, internet criminals, drug dealers and pornographers. These trends might scotch any illusions of linear and easy progress but they do not. If Dostoevsky’s over-quoted ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’ is true, nihilism steps into the vacuum, and subsequently moralistic alarm steps in to call for a return to traditional values. But Pandora’s box will not close, every demon is now loose.”

DisenchantmentDostoevskyDepressive Realism
Book:Depressive Realism: Interdisciplinary perspectives
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“I am trying to explain as quickly as possible my essential nature, that is, what manner of man I am, what I believe in, and for what I hope, that's it, isn't it? And therefore I tell you that I accept God honestly and simply. But you must note this: If God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been some very distinguished ones, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more generally the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with a conception of only three dimensions. And so I accept God and am glad to, and what's more I accept His wisdom, His purpose - which are utterly beyond our ken; I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended. I believe in the Word to Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was "with God", and Which Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity.”

GodDostoevskyIvanBrother S KaramazovEuclid S Algorithm
Book:The Brothers Karamazov
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“Like his Russian contemporary Dostoevsky — who wrote his entire novel ‘The Gambler’ in three weeks to pay off desperate gambling debts — Mendeleev threw together his first table to meet a textbook publisher’s deadline.”

DostoevskyPeriodic TableThe GamblerMendeleev
Book:The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
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“Comme la vie est lente... Comme l'espérance est violente..." Ce sont les mots d'un poète. Dostoïevski a probablement montré l'inverse et le constat qui est le sien serait plutôt que la vie est violente et l'espérance lente à porter son fruit. Il aura, en revanche, donné à voir le déchirement induit par la différence d'allure que pointait Apollinaire. [...] Ce que le poète a désigné n'en est pas moins révélateur de cela même qui fonde les romans de Dostoïevski et, peut-être, la littérature en son principe. Il ne s'agit en effet rien de moins que du constat que la vie ne parvient pas à s'établir sur la pointe de ses bonheurs. D'où ce déséquilibre entre elle et le désir. D'où ce décalage entre le vécu et l'espérance. Ce n'est pas à dire que la joie y manque forcément, mais qu'on ne sait pas durer le souffle coupé par l'émotion d'un surcroît. Or la parole littéraire, en ce qu'elle nous ressemble, en ce qu'elle ressemble à nos vécus, ne séjourne pas davantage sur les points d'intensité heureuse qu'on voudrait y représenter.”

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Book:Dostoïevski, Le meurtre et l'espérance
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“Just as his sentimentalism is profoundly middle-class and plebeian, but his irrationalism reactionary, so his moral philosophy also contains an inner contradiction: on the one hand, it is saturated with strongly plebeian characteristics, but on the other, it contains the germ of a new aristocratism. The concept of the ‘beautiful soul’ presupposes the complete dissolution of kalo-kagathia and implies the perfect spiritualization of all human values, but it also implies an application of aesthetic criteria to morality and is bound up with the view that moral values are the gift of nature. It means the recognition of a nobility of soul to which everyone has a right by nature, but in which the place of irrational birthrights is taken by an equally irrational quality of moral genius. The way of Rousseau’s ‘spiritual beauty’ leads, on the one hand, to characters like Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, who is a saint in the guise of an epilectic and an idiot, on the other, to the ideal of individual moral perfection which knows no social responsibility and does not aspire to be socially useful. Goethe, the Olympian, who thinks of nothing but his own spiritual perfection, is a disciple of Rousseau just as much as the young freethinker who wrote Werther.”

NatureMoralityGoetheDostoevskyRousseauNobility Of SoulNew AristocracySpiritulization
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
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“Fyodor Pavlovich, for example, began with practically nothing, was a landowner of the very least important category, went trotting around other people’s dinner tables, aspired to the rank of sponge, but at the moment of his decease turned out to possess something to the tune of one hundred thousand roubles in ready money. And yet at the same time he had persisted all his life in being one of the most muddle-headed madcaps in the whole of our district. I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever — but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety.”

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Author:Fëdor Dostoevskij
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“It's obvious that at such times reading represented for me something like the center of reality; the rest seemed to me freaks of nature . . . hallucinations perhaps would be more appropriate. Since that other world was one in which I was unhappy, I didn't pay it much heed. It was this kind of thinking that was responsible for my idealistic bent. It stems from my conviction that reality can be learned from words, and I remained convinced for at least thirty years that a book offered you a kind of truth, a truth difficult to seize, even a metaphysical truth, and that it revealed secrets about various things. I remember that when I was seventeen or so I read Dostoevsky, and I had the distinct impression that he was offering me a secret. I wasn't quite sure what it was, but a secret nonetheless that transcended not only ordinary knowledge but also scientific knowledge, something slightly mysterious. And that kind of thinking remained with me for a long time, until finally I realized that literature was only one more human activity among many others, and as such it did not reveal any secret: what it does is no more or no less than record the full scope of how a particular period in history views the world and its people. But it took me a long time to see that. And at the time I'm referring to—when I was fifteen or so, and then later on during my last year before the baccalaureate—I was in the process of contracting what I was later to call my neurosis, that is, the notion that since reality had been given to me through books, I would make contact with reality, and offer a more profound truth about the world, if I wrote books myself. The idea was the discovery, the thing one reveals, and it certainly derived from all the elements I have just mentioned.”

WritingRealityTruthReadingIdealismDostoevsky
Book:Sartre by himself: A film directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat with the participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, Andre Gorz, Jean Pouillon
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