Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

       Fyodor Dostoevsky
       1821-1881
      
       Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
      
       Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
      
       His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

If God does not exist, everything is permissible.     Topics: Atheism One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.     Topics: Character, Laughter We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.     Topics: Character The soul is healed by being with children.     Topics: Children, Healing If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.     Topics: Eternity, Believing There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.     Topics: Fear Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.     Topics: Good and Evil, Beauty, The Heart It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.     Topics: Habits, Life Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.     Topics: Happiness Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.     Topics: Happiness Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.     Topics: Happiness The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.     Topics: Happiness