Timeless Dostoevsky Quotes That Dive Deep into the Human Soul

1. “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

2. “To live without hope is to cease to live.”

3. “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

4. “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”

5. “The soul is healed by being with children.”

6. “Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.”

7. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!”

8. “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”

9. “It is better to be with God and be wrong than to be with men and be right.”

10. “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”

11. “Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

12. “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.”

13. “Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”

14. “The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”

15. “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unraveled, and if you spend your whole life unraveling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time.”

16. “You can be sincere and still be stupid.”

17. “Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.”

18. “Above all, don’t lie to yourself.”

19. “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”

20. “To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”

21. “A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.”

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

23. “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

24. “People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts.”

25. “Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it… one must have the courage to dare.”

26. “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.”

27. “A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.”

28. “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”

29. “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

30. “The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is.”