Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky; 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 November 1821
CityMoscow, Russia
beast humans human-beings
A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
life philosophy men
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
atheist world easier
It is easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world.
memories men may
If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.
punishment ideas numbers
People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
hell hopelessness inscriptions
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."
pain fear-of-death
God is the pain of the fear of death
growing-up dust ashes
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.
book sight people
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
men numbers finding-yourself
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.
profound ridiculous left
There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.
miracle facts realist
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.
punishment murder crime
To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.
fall stronger demand
If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.