Discover the profound wisdom of Fyodor Dostoyevsky through his most famous quotes. From the exploration of human nature and the pursuit of meaning to the complexities of love and self-destruction, these quotes offer a glimpse into the mind of one of the greatest literary masters of all time.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, often known as Dostoyevsky, was a highly influential Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Considered one of the greatest novelists in world literature, his works explore the human condition within the troubled political and social climate of 19th-century Russia. Dostoevsky delves into various philosophical and religious themes in his acclaimed novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. He is also recognized for his novella Notes from Underground, which is regarded as an early work of existentialist literature.
Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky developed a passion for literature at an early age through fairy tales and books by Russian and foreign authors. After experiencing personal hardship with the death of his mother and being arrested for belonging to a literary group critical of Tsarist Russia, he spent four years in a Siberian prison camp followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. Despite facing financial difficulties due to his gambling addiction at times, Dostoevsky became immensely popular as a writer over time.
Dostoevsky's extensive body of work consists of novels, novellas, short stories, and other writings that have been widely read both within Russia and beyond its borders. His literary accomplishments influenced numerous later writers including Russian authors Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, as well as philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated into over 170 languages, Dostoevsky's books continue to inspire films and contribute to various literary movements such as Existentialism and Freudianism.
With a noble family background rooted in Russian Orthodox Christianity on his paternal side and merchant heritage on his maternal side, Dostoevsky had diverse familial roots. His father pursued a career in medicine and eventually became a senior physician, while his mother's lineage consisted of merchants. Dostoevsky's upbringing included spending summers in the town of Darovoye, where his family owned a small estate. He was one of eight children born to his parents and had siblings named Varvara, Andrei, Lyubov, Vera, Nikolai, and Aleksandra.
“To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred.”
Part 1, Chapter 9 (page 32)
Notes from Underground (1864)
Context: To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.
Part 2, Chapter 1 (pages 45-46)
Notes from Underground (1864)
Context: The characteristics of our "romantics" are absolutely and directly opposed to the transcendental European type, and no European standard can be applied to them. (Allow me to make use of this word "romantic" — an old-fashioned and much respected word which has done good service and is familiar to all.) The characteristics of our romantics are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it; to refuse to accept anyone or anything, but at the same time not to despise anything; to give way, to yield, from policy; never to lose sight of a useful practical object (such as rent-free quarters at the government expense, pensions, decorations), to keep their eye on that object through all the enthusiasms and volumes of lyrical poems, and at the same time to preserve "the sublime and the beautiful" inviolate within them to the hour of their death, and to preserve themselves also, incidentally, like some precious jewel wrapped in cotton wool if only for the benefit of "the sublime and the beautiful." Our "romantic" is a man of great breadth and the greatest rogue of all our rogues, I assure you.... I can assure you from experience, indeed. Of course, that is, if he is intelligent. But what am I saying! The romantic is always intelligent, and I only meant to observe that although we have had foolish romantics they don't count, and they were only so because in the flower of their youth they degenerated into Germans, and to preserve their precious jewel more comfortably, settled somewhere out there — by preference in Weimar or the Black Forest.
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), I
Context: I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.
And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last November — on the third of November, to be precise — and I remember every instant since.
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), IV
Context: Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all … But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.
“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering.”
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), III
Context: On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), V
Context: How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.
“To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.”
...что слишком сознавать — это болезнь, настоящая, полная болезнь.
Part 1, Chapter 2 (page 9)
Notes from Underground (1864)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
Part 1, Chapter 5 (page 19)
Notes from Underground (1864)
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), I
The Idiot (1868–9)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
“Humiliate the reason and distort the soul…”
The Idiot (1868–9)
“Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.”
Kirilov, Part III, Ch. VI, "A busy night"
The Possessed (1872)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
“Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.”
Crime and Punishment (1866)
“I am a sick man… I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.”
Я человек больной... Я злой человек. Непривлекательный я человек.
Part 1, Chapter 1 (page 7)
Notes from Underground (1864)
“To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.”
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), III
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
Part 2, Chapter 2 (page 56)
Notes from Underground (1864)
Book II, ch. 4 (trans. Constance Garnett)
The Elder Zossima, speaking to Mrs. Khoklakov
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
Book II, ch. 4 (trans. Constance Garnett)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
“The formula 'two plus two equals five' is not without its attractions.”
Part 1, Chapter 9 (page 31)
Notes from Underground (1864)
“My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.”
The Devil (Ivan's Nightmare)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
“Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that.”
Part II, Ch. I
The Possessed (1872)
Variant translations:
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility… Do get up from your knees and sit down, I beg you, these posturings are false, too.
Part I, Book I: A Nice Little Family, Ch. 2 : The Old Buffoon; as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, p. 44
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
Book II, ch. 3 (trans. Constance Garnett)
The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
Crime and Punishment (1866)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
“What terrible tragedies realism inflicts on people.”
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
As quoted in Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane (1950) by Harold Victor Martin.
Variant translation:
I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.
Last Notebook (1880–1881), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 83: 696; as quoted in Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (2004), p. 21, hdn ISBN 0-313-30384-3
“Faith is not in power but in truth.”
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
“Pass by us, and forgive us our happiness.”
The Idiot (1868–9)
“Why count the days, when even one days is enough for a man to know all happiness?”
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), III
