Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

The imagination is always the best torturer.

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

In the world of the present, in our time, we feel that suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul, are greater than ever before in the history of mankind.

Despair doth strike as deep a furrow in the brain as mischief or remorse.

There are materials enough in every man's mind to make a hell there.

There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.

Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.

For a long time that's all I could do, howl and scream and cry like the wild animal of the night that I'd become.

The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

I was oppressed with the sensations I then felt; I sunk under the weight of them.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

There are much more terrible things than physical injury.

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.