Quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky

The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.

Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.

Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.

A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

If there were no God, he would have to be invented.

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

My friends, God is necessary for me if only because he is the one being who can be loved eternally.

The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.

Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.

God is the pain of the fear of death

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

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?

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

It's not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.

God knows what lives in me in place of me.

Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.