Dostoyevsky Quotes

• The soul is healed by being with children. --Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  William P. Young

  Children, Healing, Healed You

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• A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Hate, Men, High Standards

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• I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Dream, Real, Night

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012). “The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky”, p.13, Modern Library

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• Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.

  Edwin Muir

  Character, Reality, Literature

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• Russia is a place of great culture. If you've read Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov...the culture of the great Russian literature is amazing. The human narrative you get out of "War and Peace" is universal.

  Andre Leon Talley

  War, Russia, Culture

  Source: wwd.com

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• People think I'm crazy to put myself through such torture, though I would argue otherwise. Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness... Dostoyevsky had it right: 'Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.' Never are my senses more engaged than when the pain sets in. There is a magic in misery. Just ask any runner.

  Dean Karnazes

  Running, Pain, Confused

  "Ultramarathon Man". Book by Dean Karnazes, March 17, 2005.

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• I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Men, Wonder

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.498, Simon and Schuster

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• If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.

  Uzo Aduba

  Tchaikovsky, Ifs

  "Why Uzo Aduba Wouldn’t Change Her Nigerian Name For Acting headshot" by Jessica Dickerson, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 26, 2014.

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• It is regrettable that a Dostoyevsky did not live near this most interesting of all decadents (Jesus Christ) - I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Jesus, Mean, Interesting

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• What, after all, are the world's deepest problems? They are what they always have been, the individual's problems—the meaning of life and death, the mastery of self, the quest for value and worth-whileness and freedom within, the transcending of loneliness, the longing for love and a sense of significance, and for peace. Society's problems are deep, but the individual's problems go deeper; Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, or Shakespeare will show us that, if we hesitate to take it from the Bible.

  J. I. Packer

  Loneliness, Self, Life And Death

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• My God, I'd love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, 'Well done, you god-damn genius.'

  Mel Brooks

  Hands, Genius, Done

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• I identify with my culture, but I am happy to be living on a tolerant, intellectual island where I can deal with Dostoyevsky and Sartre, both great influences for me.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Islands, Intellectual, Culture

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

  Wendy Lesser

  Self, Voice, Greek

  Wendy Lesser (2014). “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books”, p.98, Macmillan

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• I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Self, Epilepsy, Feet

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• Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.

  Dustin Hoffman

  People, Looks, Poverty

  "What I've Learned: Dustin Hoffman" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. October 16, 2007.

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• To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.

  John Cowper Powys

  Book, Mean, People

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• I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction after all comes from a different, less rationally manipulable side of the brain. I am personally very attached to reactionary figures like Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, and Céline.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Thinking, Political Opinions, Brain

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We talk about a civilization and love and we're seeing it at the end. So many people around the world are - that whole electronic band that Dostoyevsky imagined of love around the world - that every contribution, every moment of love, every act of kindness feeds that and is like a reservoir for somebody in need to draw upon.

  Michael Novak

  Kindness, Civilization, People

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• I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

  Norman MacCaig

  Boys, Great Love, Literature

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• Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

  Larry McMurtry

  Art, Pain, Genius

  Larry McMurtry (2010). “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

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• It's more interesting when people overcome inner turbulence, but at the same time I do like the innocent. Have you ever read The Idiot? I think Dostoyevsky created a brilliant character there. He doesn't have any self-inflicted wounds. I love that. People don't like him because he's so pure.

  Josh Hartnett

  Character, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

  Jean Rhys

  Writing, Lakes, Rivers

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• Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.

  Bob Dylan

  Mind, Stories, Sticks

  "Only Human Driftin' And Learnin'" by Sidney Fields. New York Mirror, December 9, 1963.

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• Your eyes flashed fire into my soul. I immediately read the words of Dostoyevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, I FANCY YOU!

  Eddie Izzard

  Eye, Fire, Soul

  "Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill". Documentary, Comedy, 1999.

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• If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Written, Ifs

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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