The Idiot Quotes

“It was all quite natural, human beings are created in order to torment one another.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“I must add... my gratitude to you for the attention with which you have listened to me, for, from my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“I'm drunk but truthful.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“What matters," said the prince at last, "is that you have a child's trusting nature and extraordinary truthfulness. Do you know that a great deal can be forgiven you for that alone?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Я хочу хоть с одним человеком обо всем говорить как с собой”
― Федор Достоевский, Идиот

“Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Delicacy and dignity are taught by one's own heart, not by a dancing master.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“Perhaps I shall meet with troubles and many disappointments, but I have made up my mind to be polite and sincere to everyone; more cannot be asked of me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Speak of a wolf and you see his tail!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“In every idea emanating from genius, or even in every serious human idea -- born in the human brain -- there always remains something -- some sediment -- which cannot be expressed to others, though one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thirty years. There is always a something, a remnant, which will never come out from your brain, but will remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever, and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what may be the very essence of your idea to a single living soul.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophecy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it. Take my word for it, the highest moment if his happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn't the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces.
Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life -- the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Beauty is a riddle”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“love equates people”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Do you know, to my thinking it's a good thing sometimes to be absurd; it's better in fact, it makes it easier to forgive one another, it's easier to be humble. One can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan't understand them thoroughly.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith to a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Such power!" Adelaida cried all at once, peering greedily at the portrait over her sister's shoulder.

"Where? What power?" Lizaveta Prokofyevna asked sharply.

"Such beauty has power," Adelaida said hotly. "You can overturn the world with such beauty.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“It is an unchristian religion, in the first place!' the prince resumed in great agitation and with excessive sharpness. 'That's in the first place, and secondly, Roman Catholicism is even worse than atheism - that's my opinion. Yes, that's my opinion! Atheism merely preaches a negation, but Catholicism goes further: it preaches a distorted Christ, a Christ calumniated and defamed by it, the opposite of Christ! It preaches Antichrist - I swear it does, I assure you it does! This is my personal opinion, an opinion I've held for a long time, and it has worried me a lot myself. ... Roman Catholicism believes that the Church cannot exist on earth without universal temporal power, and cries: Non possumus! In my opinion, Roman Catholicism isn't even a religion, but most decidedly a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinated to that idea, beginning with faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne and took up the sword; and since then everything has gone on in the same way, except that they've added lies, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition wickedness. They have trifled with the most sacred, truthful, innocent, ardent feelings of the people, have bartered it all for money, for base temporal power. And isn't this the teaching of Antichrist? Isn't it clear that atheism had to come from them? And it did come from them, from Roman Catholicism itself! Atheism originated first of all with them: how could they believe in themselves? It gained ground because of abhorrence of them; it is the child of their lies and their spiritual impotence! Atheism! In our country it is only the upper classes who do not believe, as Mr Radomsky so splendidly put it the other day, for they have lost their roots. But in Europe vast numbers of the common people are beginning to lose their faith - at first from darkness and lies, and now from fanaticism, hatred of the Church and Christianity!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“She is passion embodied, a flower of melodrama in eternal bloom.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“We degrade Providence too much by attributing our ideas to it out of annoyance at being unable to understand it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Abstract love of humanity is nearly always love of self.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Let me add, however, that in every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others, though you wrote volumes about it and spent thirty-five years in explaining your idea; something will always be left that will obstinately refuse to emerge from your head and that will remain with you for ever and you will die without having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps the most vital point of your idea.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot