Quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all mens sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.

The monks used to say that he was more drawn to those who were more sinful, and the greater the sinner the more he loved him.

At some thoughts one stands perplexed - especially at the sight of mens sin - and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that, once and for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

[T]hat they may believe you, you must say it as obscurely as possible, just like that, simply in hints. You must only give them a peep of the truth, just enough to tantalize them. Theyll tell a story better than ours, and of course theyll believe themselves more than they would us...

But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.

However, do you know what? I am convinced that fellows like me who live in dark cellars must be kept under restraint. They may be able to live in their dark cellars for forty years and never open their mouths, but the moment they get into the light of day and break out they may talk and talk and talk...

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave

Whats most revolting is that one is really sad! No, its better at home. Here at least one blames others for everything and excuses oneself.

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.

[Alyosha] was to some extent a youth of our last epoch — that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal, such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.

He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel.

I dont like being with grown-up people. Ive known that a long time. I dont like it because I dont know how to get on with them.

Well, sir, it is precisely my notion that one sees and learns most of all by observing our younger generations.

...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?

Ones own free unfettered choice, ones own caprice, however wild it may be, ones own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very most advantageous advantage which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

Lunatics! Vain creatures! They dont believe in God, they dont believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that youll end up by eating one another, thats what I prophesy.