Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Quotes

The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.

I am forty now, and forty years is a lifetime; it is extremely old age. To go on living after forty is unseemly, disgusting, immoral! Who goes on living after forty? Give me a sincere and honest answer! I’ll tell you – fools and rogues.

Man may purposely, consciously choose for himself even the harmful and the stupid, even the stupidest thing… it preserves for us the most important and most precious thing – our personality, our individuality.

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 immortal, everything would be permissible even cannibalism.

I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good […]

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: “Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.”

In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.

If the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

It’s nice to have a chat with a clever man