Dostoevsky Quotes
Prepared by: Dmitry Sirotkin
I present to you a selection of quotes from the writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky .
Some of them are distasteful , but all of them are of interest.
What’s impressive is that they are not smoothed over to fit the image of a great writer, because sometimes quotes from great people are too didactic and impersonal.
Dostoevsky wrote a lot, and there were also a lot of quotes. They are divided into topics: human manifestations, people, women, religion and atheism, Russia and Russians, Europe, life, happiness and unhappiness, improving the world and oneself, love, children, writing and writers, books, meaning and goals, truth and truth , beauty, socialists and liberals, war, intelligence, dreamers, etc.
Quotes about Dostoevsky are also provided.
About human manifestations
Know that there is such a limit of shame in the consciousness of one’s own insignificance and weakness, beyond which a person can no longer go and from which he begins to feel enormous pleasure in his very shame.
The deepest egoism lies at the basis of all human virtues.
Scoundrels love honest people.
It was what always happens: the one you love the most is the one you insult first.
You are a smart and kind person and... and... it’s just a pity that you are such a fool!
Many people are honest because they are fools.
Everyone says that they hate evil, but secretly everyone loves it.
Friendship is just a glorified word, in essence: mutual outpouring.
Man loves the fall of the righteous and his shame.
There are moments when people love crime.
They say that those who stand on high seem to be drawn down into the abyss.
The secret consciousness of power is unbearably more pleasant than obvious dominance.
A low soul, coming out from under oppression, oppresses itself.
I hate you precisely because I allowed you so much, and I hate you even more because I need you so much. But for now I need you - I need to take care of you.
These were two enemies in love with each other.
A person in shame usually begins to get angry and tends toward cynicism.
All direct people and figures are active because they are stupid and limited.
I don’t know how to remain silent when my heart speaks.
And I am a master of speaking silently, I have spoken silently all my life and lived entire tragedies with myself in silence.
It is sometimes very difficult for a strong person to bear his strength.
I came to warn you: do not lend me money, because I will certainly ask.
The worse, the better.
About people
The scoundrel-man gets used to everything!
There is nothing more offensive to a person of our time and tribe than to tell him that he is not original, weak in character, without special talents and an ordinary person.
A person does not live his whole life, but creates himself, creates himself.
People were created to torment each other.
However, how joy and happiness make a person beautiful!
A person who knows how to hug is a good person.
After all, it is necessary that every person should have at least one place where they would feel sorry for him!
I even think that the best definition of a person is: a creature on two legs and ungrateful.
Every person is responsible to all people for all people and for everything.
Curious what people fear most? They are most afraid of a new step, a new word of their own.
The qualities of an executioner are in embryo in almost every modern person.
In most cases, people, even villains, are much more naive and simple-minded than we generally assume about them. And so do we ourselves.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be solved, and if you spend your whole life solving it, don’t say you wasted your time; I deal with this mystery because I want to be a man.
People do not love, moreover, they hate those whom they have offended.
Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right...
It's amazing what one ray of sunshine can do to a person's soul!
What can a decent person talk about with the greatest pleasure? Answer: about myself.
Do you know that very many people are sick precisely because of their health, that is, with an exorbitant confidence in their normality, and are thereby infected with terrible conceit, unscrupulous narcissism, sometimes reaching almost to the conviction of their infallibility.
By the way, quotes about people
About women
The life of every woman, no matter what she preaches, is an eternal search for someone to submit to.
Women are our greatest hope; perhaps they will serve all of Russia at the most fatal moment.
A woman is always a woman, even a nun.
Women were ruined by mere unoriginality.
Women have such cases when it is very, very pleasant to be insulted, despite all the visible indignation. We all have them, these cases. But this is especially true for women.
A fool with a heart and no mind is just as unfortunate a fool as a fool with a mind without a heart. Old truth.
There are women who are only suitable as mistresses and nothing else.
Every woman has her own highlight, but in order to find it, you don’t need to crumble the whole pie.
There is such a trait in a woman’s character that if, for example, a woman is guilty of something, then she would sooner, later, agree to make amends for her guilt with a thousand caresses, than at the present moment, during the most obvious evidence of a wrongdoing, to admit it and ask for forgiveness .
By the way, quotes about women
About religion and atheism
I would believe in you, God, if the children did not cry.
The harmony of the world is not worth the tears of a tortured child.
It’s not that I don’t accept God, I don’t accept the world he created and I can’t agree to accept it.
In my opinion, Christ’s love for people is in its own way a miracle impossible on earth. True, he was a god. But we are not gods.
I need God because he is the only being who can be loved forever.
Anyone who wants to see the living God should look for him not in the empty firmament of his own mind, but in human love.
The absence of God cannot be replaced by love for humanity, because man will immediately ask: why should I love humanity?
Man did nothing but invent God in order to live without killing himself; This is the whole world history so far.
Man seeks not so much God as miracles.
The most serious problems of modern man arise from the fact that he has lost the sense of meaningful cooperation with God in His purpose for humanity.
Conscience without God is horror; it can go astray to the point of immorality.
If somehow it turned out... that Christ is outside the truth and the truth is outside Christ, then I would prefer to remain with Christ outside the truth...
The idea of immortality is life itself, living life, its final formula and the main source of truth and correct consciousness for humanity.
Russian atheism has never gone further than a pun.
Atheism is an aristocratic disease, a disease of higher education and development, therefore, it must be disgusting to the people.
Religion is only a formula for morality.
In abstract love for humanity, you almost always love only yourself.
By the way, quotes about religion
About Russia and the Russian people
No, it’s better in your homeland: here, at least, you blame others for everything and justify yourself.
The more national we are, the more we will be Europeans (all people).
In our strange Russia you can do whatever you want.
I think the most important, most fundamental spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, everlasting and insatiable, everywhere and in everything. He seems to have been infected with this thirst for suffering from time immemorial. The Russian people seem to enjoy their suffering.
The Russian people are ready to forget whole torments for one kind word.
The highest and most striking characteristic feature of our people is a sense of justice and a thirst for it.
It’s so easy for a Russian person to become an atheist, easier than for everyone else in the whole world! And our people not only become atheists, but will certainly believe in atheism, as if in a new faith, without even noticing that they believed in zero.
Russian people are generally broad people... broad, like their land...
Russians often laugh when they should cry.
Show a Russian schoolchild a map of the starry sky, about which he had no idea until then, and tomorrow he will return this map to you, corrected. No knowledge and selfless conceit.
In Russia, drunk people are the kindest. We have the kindest people and the drunkest.
The measure of a people is not what it is, but what it considers beautiful and true.
Literacy causes arrogance among people.
A Russian without Orthodoxy is rubbish, not a person.
By the way, quotes about Russia
About Europe
To a Russian, Europe is as precious as Russia; every stone in it is sweet and dear... Oh, these old foreign stones are dear to the Russians, these wonders of God’s old world, these fragments of holy miracles; and even this is more valuable to us than to them!
You will never get anything for free. We will work, we will have our own opinion. And since we will never work, those who have hitherto worked instead of us will have an opinion for us, that is, the same Europe, the same Germans - our two-hundred-year-old teachers.
Paris is the only city in the world where you can suffer without being unhappy.
About life
The fantastic is the essence of reality.
Absurdities are too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and without them, perhaps nothing at all would have happened in it.
Life goes breathless without an aim.
You must love life more than the meaning of life.
Compassion is the most important and, perhaps, the only law of existence for all humanity.
Moral deprivation is worse than all physical torments.
The point is in life, in one life - in its opening, continuous and eternal, and not in opening at all!
Power is given only to those who dare to bend down and take it.
Every decent man should be under the shoe of at least some woman.
Humanity is only a habit, the fruit of civilization. It may completely disappear.
In troubled times of hesitation or transition, different people always and everywhere appear.
Every provincial lives as if under a glass bell. There is absolutely no way to hide anything from your respectable fellow citizens.
Being only begins to be when it is threatened with non-existence.
I went to have fun and went to a funeral.
By the way, quotes about life
About happiness and unhappiness
If you want, a person must be deeply unhappy, because then he will be happy. If he is constantly happy, he will immediately become deeply unhappy.
A person is unhappy because he does not know that he is happy; just because. That's it, that's it! Whoever finds out will immediately become happy, this very minute.
Misfortune is a contagious disease. The unfortunate and poor need to stay away from each other so as not to become even more infected.
There is no happiness in comfort; happiness is bought through suffering.
Happiness is not in happiness, but only in its achievement.
Happiness does not lie in the pleasures of love alone, but in the highest harmony of the spirit.
When the whole person achieves happiness, there will be no more time, because there is no need.
You know, I don’t understand how you can walk past a tree and not be happy that you see it? Talk to a person and not be happy that you love him!
Don’t clog your memory with grievances, otherwise there may simply be no room left for beautiful moments.
When we are unhappy, we feel the unhappiness of others more strongly.
By the way, quotes about happiness
About improving the world and yourself
He who wants to do good can do a lot of good even with his hands tied.
How to destroy evil on earth? - Destroy the world.
To achieve perfection, you must first not understand many things.
Whatever seems bad inside you is purified by the mere fact that you have noticed it in yourself.
A fool who admits that he is a fool is no longer a fool!
Here you need to speak eye to eye... so that the soul can be read on the face, so that the heart is reflected in the sounds of the word. One word spoken with conviction, with complete sincerity and without hesitation, face to face, means much more than dozens of sheets of paper written on it.
You will say that we must correct children. Listen: we should not be proud of children, we are worse than them. And if we teach them something to make them better, then they teach us a lot and also make us better just by our contact with them.
About love
In a truly loving heart, either jealousy kills love, or love kills jealousy.
Why is love praised? For suffering. People like to feel like holy martyrs, hostages of passions. Love is the most complex emotion, but it is finite, like everything in this world. And there is nothing sacred in it, as well as in those who believe and wait for it.
I love you because you didn't fall in love with me.
You can’t love perfection; perfection can only be looked at as perfection.
The joy of love is great, but the suffering is so great that it is better not to love at all.
No one will make the first move, because everyone thinks that it is not mutual.
All love passes, but dissimilarity remains.
I love her not with love, but with pity.
By the way, quotes about love
About children
You can tell a child anything, everything. Nothing should be hidden from children under the pretext that they are small and that it is too early for them to know.
Children, while children, up to seven years old for example, are terribly distant from people: it’s like they’re a completely different creature and with a different nature.
Without children it would be impossible to love humanity so much.
A person has no more precious memories than those from his first childhood in his parents’ home.
Big people don’t know that a child, even in the most difficult matter, can give extremely important advice.
Children in schools are a ruthless people: individually they are angels of God, but together, especially in schools, they are very often ruthless.
A person who has not been a child will be a bad citizen.
By the way, quotes about children
About writing and writers
Art is such a need for a person as eating and drinking. The need for beauty and creativity, which embodies it, is inseparable from a person, and without it a person, perhaps, would not want to live in the world.
Remember my testament: never invent any plot or intrigue. Take what life itself gives. Life is much richer than all our imaginations! No imagination can come up with what the most ordinary, ordinary life sometimes gives you, respect life!
I have now re-read what I just wrote, and I see that I am much smarter than what I wrote. How does it happen that what a smart person says is much more stupid than what remains in him?
A writer whose works have not been successful easily becomes a bitter critic: just like a weak and tasteless wine can become excellent vinegar.
About books
To stop reading books means to stop thinking.
It happens that you live, but you don’t know that there is a book next to you, where your whole life is laid out as if on your fingers.
When I see around me how people, not knowing what to do with their free time, seek out the most miserable activities and entertainment, I look for a book and say internally: this alone is enough for a whole life.
By the way, quotes about books
About meaning and purpose
I want to talk to at least one person about everything, as if I were talking to myself.
It takes very little to destroy a person: you just need to convince him that the work he is doing is of no use to anyone.
The main idea should always be unattainably higher than the possibility of its execution.
If you set off towards your goal and start stopping along the way to throw stones at every dog barking at you, you will never reach your goal.
By the way, quotes about the meaning of life
About truth and truth
Truth without love is a lie.
Truth is more poetic than anything in the world...
The real truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more believable, you must certainly mix lies into it.
You have no tenderness: there is only truth, therefore it is unfair.
You have to be a truly great person to be able to resist even common sense.
By the way, quotes about the truth
About beauty
Beauty will save the world.
Beauty is not only a terrible, but also a mysterious thing. Here the devil fights with God, and the battlefield is the hearts of people.
Beauty is inherent in everything healthy.
By the way, quotes about beauty
About socialists and liberals
You know, socialism in our country is spreading mainly out of sentimentality.
In essence, our teaching is a denial of honor, and that with an open right to dishonor, it is easier to entice a Russian person to follow you.
A Christian socialist is worse than an atheist socialist.
Our Russian liberal is first and foremost a lackey and is only looking to clean someone's boots.
“Higher liberalism” and “highest liberal,” that is, a liberal without any goal, are possible only in Russia alone.
About war
International war brings only one benefit, in all respects, and is therefore absolutely necessary.
War refreshes people. Humanity is most developed only on the battlefield.
Generosity perishes in periods of long peace. A long peace hardens people. A long peace produces apathy, baseness of thought, debauchery, and dulls feelings. Social preponderance during a long peace always in the end turns to brute wealth.
If there had not been a war in the world, art would have died out completely. All the best ideas of art come from war and struggle.
By the way, quotes about war
About the mind
He is a smart man, but to act smartly, intelligence alone is not enough.
Limited people... do stupid things much less than smart people.
Stupidity is short and simple, but the mind wiggles and hides. Intelligence is scoundrel, but stupidity is direct and honest.
About dreamers
A dreamer is not a person, but, you know, some kind of neuter creature.
I'm a dreamer; I have so little real life that I consider moments like this, as now, so rare that I cannot help but repeat these minutes in my dreams. I will dream about you all night, all week, all year.
By the way, quotes about dreams
About selfishness
Science says: love yourself first, first of all, for everything in the world is based on personal interest.
Egoists are capricious and cowardly in the face of duty: they have an eternal cowardly aversion to bind themselves to any duty.
Should the light fail, or should I not drink tea?
About lies
The main thing - do not lie to yourself. He who lies to himself and listens to his own lies reaches such a point that he no longer discerns any truth either in himself or around him, and therefore begins to disrespect both himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and in order, not having love, to occupy himself and entertain himself, he indulges in passions and coarse sweets and reaches the point of complete bestiality in his vices.
Lying is the only human privilege over all organisms.
By the way, quotes about lies
About the soul
The soul is healed next to children.
Laughter is the truest test of the soul.
By the way, quotes about the soul
About the devil and hell
If the devil does not exist and, therefore, man created him, then he created him in his own image and likeness.
What is hell? - The suffering of not being able to love anymore.
About freedom
Freedom is not about not restraining yourself, but about being in control of yourself.
I tell you that a person has no more painful concern than how to find someone to whom he can quickly transfer the gift of freedom with which this unfortunate creature is born.
By the way, quotes about freedom
About money
Money is minted freedom.
A man with money is a man everywhere.
By the way, quotes about money
About Me
My name is psychologist. Not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense, that is, I depict all the depths of the human soul.
I am afraid of only one thing - to be unworthy of my torment.
About miscellaneous
In fact, people sometimes speak about the “brutal” cruelty of man, but this is terribly unfair and offensive to animals: an animal can never be as cruel as a person, so artistically, so artistically cruel.
My friend, remember that silence is good, safe and beautiful.
In everything there is a line beyond which it is dangerous to cross; for once you have stepped over, it is impossible to go back.
Madmen pave the way for the sensible to follow.
Time is the relationship of being to non-being.
Marriage is the moral death of every proud soul, of all independence.
I noticed that in a cramped apartment even my thoughts are cramped.
As you noticed, in this review of Dostoevsky’s quotes there is no division between his personal quotes and quotes from his works. In this case, this seems especially justified, since, as Yu. Aikhenvald noted, “much stronger than other writers, in his faces and scenes he only gives embodiment, objectification of his personal feelings and passions. All this is psychology, his own psychology in the faces, in the living hieroglyphs of the author’s confession; all this is a painful revelation of his unparalleled, mottled and furrowed soul. It is she who, with Rembrandt’s light or Rembrandt’s darkness, breaks through all the heaps of plot in his novels, through all this leapfrog and nonsense of events, through the crowd and bustle of ideas and feelings that form some kind of witches’ sabbath.”
By the way, I got the impression that quotes from Dostoevsky’s works are usually more lively, varied, and often paradoxical; whereas Dostoevsky the publicist has more straightforward, correct, doctrinaire statements.
In conclusion, a few quotes about Dostoevsky:
- L. Tolstoy: An inimitable psychologist-heart expert and a completely independent writer, whose independent convictions were not forgiven for a long time in some layers of literature, just as one German, according to Carlyle, could not forgive the sun for the fact that it was impossible to light a cigar from him at any time . (by the way, quotes from Tolstoy)
- P. Struve: Dostoevsky in one person is both a great artist and a religious thinker, a combination, if the only one in world literature, then in any case the only one next to Dante.
- N. Berdyaev: A person who has joined the world of Dostoevsky becomes a new person, other dimensions of existence are revealed to him. (by the way, quotes from Berdyaev)
- V. Nabokov: I feel a little awkward talking about Dostoevsky. In my lectures, I usually look at literature from the only angle that interests me, that is, as a phenomenon of world art and a manifestation of personal talent. From this point of view, Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one, with flashes of unsurpassed humor, which, alas, alternate with long wastes of literary banalities... I won’t hide the fact that I passionately want to debunk Dostoevsky. But I am aware that the average reader will be confused by the arguments presented. (by the way, quotes from Nabokov)
- I. Brodsky: But it is not just for the sake of authenticity that Dostoevsky’s heroes, with almost Calvinistic tenacity, bare their souls to the reader. Something else forces Dostoevsky to turn their lives inside out and look at all the folds and wrinkles of their spiritual ins and outs. And this is not a desire for Truth. For the results of his inquisition reveal something more, something beyond Truth itself: they expose the primary fabric of life, and this fabric is unsightly. What pushes him to do this is a force whose name is the omnivorous gluttony of language, for which one fine day God, man, reality, guilt, death, infinity and Salvation become insufficient, and then he attacks himself. (by the way, quotes from Brodsky)
Next you can read:
- Pushkin Quotes
- Turgenev Quotes
- Freud Quotes
- Bunin quotes
- Chekhov Quotes
- Nietzsche Quotes
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Fedor Dostoevsky. 30 brilliant quotes: “If you want to conquer the whole world, conquer yourself”
“He is an artist not of that faceless abyss in which there is no image of a person, but of the human abyss, human bottomlessness. In this he is the greatest writer in the world, a world genius, of which there have been only a few in history, the greatest mind. This great mind was entirely in an effective and active relationship with man; he revealed other worlds through man.” N.A. Berdyaev.
If you want to conquer the whole world, conquer yourself.
You must love life more than the meaning of life.
People do not love, moreover, they hate those whom they have offended.
Compassion is the most important and, perhaps, the only law of existence for all humanity.
Freedom is not about not restraining yourself, but about being in control of yourself.
In everything there is a line beyond which it is dangerous to cross; for once you have stepped over, it is impossible to go back.
Happiness is not in happiness, but only in its achievement.
There are three things that most people are afraid of: trusting, telling the truth and being yourself.
Life goes breathless without an aim.
To stop reading books means to stop thinking.
The mind is a scoundrel, it will justify anything!
In a truly loving heart, either jealousy kills love, or love kills jealousy.
Artist Vasily Perov. Portrait of F.M. Dostoevsky
It takes very little to destroy a person: you just need to convince him that the work he is doing is of no use to anyone.
My friend, remember that silence is good, safe and beautiful.
He is a smart man, but to act smartly, intelligence alone is not enough.
If you set off towards your goal and start stopping along the way to throw stones at every dog barking at you, you will never reach your goal.
It's amazing what one ray of sunshine can do to a person's soul!
Every woman has her own highlight, but in order to find it, you don’t need to crumble the whole pie.
People do not love, moreover, they hate those whom they have offended.
Man loves to count his troubles, but does not count his joys.
Here you need to speak eye to eye... so that the soul can be read on the face, so that the heart is reflected in the sounds of the word. One word spoken with conviction, with complete sincerity and without hesitation, face to face, means much more than dozens of sheets of paper written on it.
The soul is healed next to children.
He who wants to do good can do a lot of good even with his hands tied.
Beauty will save the world.
In fact, people sometimes speak about the “brutal” cruelty of man, but this is terribly unfair and offensive to animals: an animal can never be as cruel as a person, so artistically, so artistically cruel.
Don’t clog your memory with grievances, otherwise there may simply be no room left for beautiful moments.
There are days in everyone's life when they need to get over it.
I want to talk to at least one person about everything, as if I were talking to myself.
A person who knows how to hug is a good person.
One day a new Name appears in your life, which turns the previous ones into dust and becomes your universe.
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