17 Quotes by Dostoyevsky

And she torments me, torments me with love. It is not like before! Before she merely tormented me with her infernal curves, but now I have accepted the whole of her soul into my own and through her have myself become a human being!Brothers Karamazov, Book XI, Ch 5

We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.

You have become her sadness and live in a different state of mind

Good Lord, only a moment of bliss? Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of a man's life?

And I saw myselt just as I was now fifteen years hence, only grown older, is the same room, living the same sort of solitary life, with the same Matryona, who had not grown a bit wiser in all those years.

I love you so, because you haven't fallen in love with me. Another man in your place would, I'm sure, have begun to pester me, to worry me. He would have been sighing, he would have looked so pathetic, but you're so sweet!

I don't love him because I can only love what is generous, what's understanding, what is honourable, for I'm like that myself, and he's not worthy of me.

...Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears--would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?

In the whole world there is no deeper, no mightier literary work. This is, so far, the last and greatest expression of human thought... And if the world were to come to an end, and people were asked there, somewhere: “Did you understand your life on earth, and what conclusions have you drawn from it?”—man could silently hand over Don Quijote.(The Diary of a Writer, cited in Gilman, 76)