Fyodor Dostoevsky

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.

Now I'm living out my life in a corner, trying to console myself with the stupid, useless excuse that an intelligent man cannot turn himself into anything, that only a fool can make anything he wants out of himself.

Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was 'sublime and beautiful,'the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.

Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!

It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.

You can't be angry with me, because I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact that I shall never see you again.

Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.

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.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!

What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?

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

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

Hell is the inability to love.

The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.