Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

I have a new plan: to go mad.

Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

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.

The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.

To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her

You know what kind of man I think you are? You’re the kind of man who would stand there and smile at his torturers while they were tearing out his guts–if only he could find faith or a god.

Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it

To go wrong in one’s own way is better then to go right in someone else’s.

What does reason know? Reasons knows only what it has managed to learn, while human nature acts as an entire whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, still it lives.

Reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life -- that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches.

But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready intentionally to distort the truth, to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, only so as to justify his logic.