Well-known Russian novelist of modernity, journalist, short-story writer, whose psychological penetration into the human soul significantly influenced the 20th-century novel. Dostoevsky’s novels have many autobiographical elements, but ultimately they deal with moral and philosophical questions. His characters have contrasting views or ideas about freedom of choice, socialism, atheism, good, evil, happiness.
His central obsession was God, whom his characters constantly search through painful errors and humiliations.
He explored moral, social, religious, psychological, political, and artistic aspects. He examined, as no one had previously, the potential for violence and the abuse of power. His works have unusual qualities.
(1821-1881)
– Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes –
If there is no God, everything is permitted.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
The soul is healed by being with children.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
To live without Hope is to Cease to live.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Realists do not fear the results of their study.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
When there is love, you can live even without happiness.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
