"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 up by eating one another, that's what I prophesy."
"We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him."
"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?"
"Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them."
"How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!"
"I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer."
"Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case."
"Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!"
"Alexandra, my eldest, here, plays the piano, or reads or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (but never finishes any); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I don't work too much, either."
"The Russian soul is a dark place."
"God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face."
"But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!"
"It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all."
"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."
"If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions."
"Do you know I don't know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it's only that I'm not able to express it...And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God's sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!..."
"Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret."
"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas."