Quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky

When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.

God is necessary, and therefore must exist...But I know that he does not and cannot exist...Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?

That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.

I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what hurts.

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?

Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?

I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man.

How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilt for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.

Every man needs a place to go to.

But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.

There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.

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

Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.

"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."

I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.