Fyodor Dostoevsky

And the more I drink the more I feel it.

That’s why I drink too.

I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink..

I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

We’re always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense.

But why must it be?

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

To stop reading books means to stop thinking.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Very little is required to destroy a person: one has only to convince him that the business he is engaged in is not necessary to anyone.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

There is no happiness in comfort.

Happiness comes from suffering.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

It’s amazing what one ray of the sun can do with the soul of a man!

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Whoever wants to be useful, even with bound hands can do a lot of good.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

To fall in love does not mean to love.

You can fall in love and hate.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Freedom is not to not restrain yourself, but to control yourself.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea.

And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Hold your tongue; you won’t understand anything.

If there is no God, then I am God.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.

Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later and are seldom clearly manifest.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion.

Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky