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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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'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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• Making eye contact during rough sex is roughly the equivalent of trying to read Dostoyevsky on a rollercoaster.

  Jenna Jameson

  Sex, Eye, Trying

  "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale". Book by Jenna Jameson, 2004.

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• I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.

  Francoise Sagan

  Thinking, Limitation

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• In adopting the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its intellectual value, and brought into it elements of social philosophy and science. In his own field - though, of course, on a proportionately lesser scale - Wells may be likened to Dostoyevsky, who took the form of the cheap detective novel and infused it with brilliant psychological analysis.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

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• We were talking about television one time, and Damon Lindelof said he felt that, if Ernst Hemingway was writing for media, he would write feature films, and Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoyevsky would write television series because there are some stories you just can't tell in two hours.

  Scott Glenn

  Writing, Film, Hours

  Source: collider.com

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• Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.

  Colin Wilson

  Two, Trying, Typical

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• I would say it was [ifluence] all the Greeks and the Russian classics like [Lev] Tolstoy, [Andrey] Goncharov,[Fedor] Dostoyevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain.

  Vera Nazarian

  Greek, Sand, Mark

  Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

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• I was raised in a household where I read Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and Kant, and I was never taught that my mind was feminine. I'm aware that my body is.

  Jewel

  Mind, Body, Taught

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• The novelistic attribute of my work is very much like the Russian way of creating novels. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - their work has so many gaps. But for the reader, you cannot erase those gaps because they are important. They contextualize the whole struggle. My cinema is like that.

  Lav Diaz

  Struggle, Creating, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

  Lynne Tillman

  Jobs, Character, Winning

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I was influenced growing up by everything from Harlequin romances to Fedor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and later Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, bell hooks.

  Danzy Senna

  Growing Up, Romance, Hook

  Source: therumpus.net

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