Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.

All the evil in the world is the fault of the self-styled pure in heart, a result of their eagerness to unearth secrets and expose them to the light of the sun.

There's no one so self-righteous as someone policing someone else's morality.

The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

The desperate addict is closer to the heart of grace than the devout moralist.

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,- - This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be otherwise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see thus, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering?

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses.

Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

Most people seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to someone. I'm not like that, which pleases me because it makes me feel superior.

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.

Fearing not that I'd become my enemy In the instant that I preach

Feel the wounded heart that's underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger.

We are inconsolable at being deceived by our enemies and being betrayed by our friends, yet we are often content in be being treated like that by our own selves.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

I can still see her face -- The sorrow in her eyes, her voice, as she condemns me. I didn't know it was possible to feel such shame. To feel so sick at heart. I'm lost inside, my soul -- all that I thought I was, and am, and ever will be -- shattered, cast to the winds. Compared to this, death is a mercy.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.