Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I love it when people lie! Lying is only man's privilege over all other organisms. Lying is what makes me a man.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You are really angry with me for not having appeared to you in a red glow, with thunder and lightning, with scorched wings

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Change is what people fear most.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of much cleverer people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to be original. But this class of person, as we have observed above, is far less happy than the first. The difficulty is that the intelligent ordinary man, even if he does imagine himself at times (and perhaps all his life) a person of genius and originality, nevertheless retains within his heart a little worm of doubt, which sometimes leads the intelligent man in the end to absolute despair. If he does yield in this belief, he is still completely poisoned with inward-driven vanity.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky