Fyodor Dostoevsky

- What is a Socialist? - That's when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no marriages, and everyone has any religion and laws he likes best. You are not old enough to understand that yet.

Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.

Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me.

Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.

For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.

Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.

I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.

The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.

Don't think I'm talking nonsense because I'm drunk. I'm not a bit drunk. Brandy's all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.

Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?...No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people's expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it--you'll find that a bit harder.

It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!

For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.

Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.

I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?

I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.