Fyodor Dostoyevsky > Quotes

“I love you because you didn't fall in love with me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“we thank some people for merely living at the same time as we do. I thank you for the fact that I met you, that I will remember you for all my life!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“And you do not need my forgiveness, nor I yours; it is all the same whether you forgive or not, all the rest of my life you will remain like a wound in my soul, and I in yours - and that is proper”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Your hand is cold, mine is as hot as fire. How blind you are, Nastenka! ... Oh, how unbearable is the happy person at certain moments! But I couldn't be angry with you! ...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The sky was so starry, is was such a bright sky that looking at it you could not help but ask yourself: is it really possible for bad-tempered and capricious people to live under such a sky?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“They locked up all their fools in a special building to reassure themselves that they're the sane ones. But really, locking somebody else up in a madhouse doesn't prove that you have brains.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bobok

“Why isn't he - you? Why isn't he like you? He's not as good as you, even though I love him more than you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh.


We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!


"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“I don't like it when people with only a general education rush to solve problems best left to specialists; and that happens all of the time among us.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bobok

“What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be mine! then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up every minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“When one loves, an injury is soon forgotten.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“I suddenly felt that it made no difference to me whether the world existed or whether nothing existed anywhere at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Why does even the best person hold back something from another? Why not say directly what we feel if we know that what we entrust won't be scattered to the winds?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“I'm a dreamer; I have so little real life that I regard much moments as this one, now, to be so rare that I can't help repeating these moments in my dreams. I will dream of you all night, for an entire week, all year long. I will come here tomorrow without fail, exactly here, to this very spot, exactly at this time, and I'll be happy as I recall what happened yesterday. This place is already dear to me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Forgive me, remember and love your
-Nastenka”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“And where there is love, you can live even without happiness. Life is good even in sorrow; it is good to live in the world. However you live.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Listen, Alyosha," Ivan began in a resolute voice, "if I am really able to care for the sticky little leaves I shall only love them, remembering you. It's enough for me that you are somewhere here, and I shan't lose my desire for life yet. Is that enough for you?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov

“If you ever fall in love, then may god grant you happiness with her! But I don't wish her anything because she will be happy with you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Suffering, sorrow are the inevitable duty of a generous conscience and a deep heart. Truly great men, I believe, must experience great sadness on this earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Do you know what has occurred to me now? I was comparing you two. Why isn't he you? Why isn't he like you? He is not as good as you, though I love him more than you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“at this moment a thousand valves have opened in my head, and I must let myself flow in a river of words, or I shall choke”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You sense that this inexhaustible fantasy is finally growing tired, that it is becoming exhausted under constant strain; because, you see, you are growing into manhood, you are outgrowing your former ideals: they are being smashed to dust, to bits and pieces; and if there is no other life, then you must build it from these bits and pieces. But meanwhile your soul yearns and pleads for something else! And in vain does the dreamer rake through his old dreams, as if they were ashes, searching in these ashes for at least some little spark, in order to fan it into flames, and with this rekindled fire warm his heart, which has grown cold, and resurrect in himself once again everything that he had held dear, that had touched his soul, that had made his blood boil, that had brought tears to his eyes and had so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Do you know what just occurred to me? I was comparing the two of you. Why isn't he - you? Why isn't he like you? He's not as good as you, even though I love him more than you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“As I sit beside you and talk to you now, I'm terrified even to think about the future, because the future is once again loneliness, once again this stagnant, useless life; and what will there be for me to dream about when I have already been so happy in real life beside you!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she’s not the point! The old woman was merely a sickness . . . I was in a hurry to step over . . . it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle! So I killed the principal, but I didn’t step over, I stayed on this side . . . All I managed to do was kill.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment