Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes on Knowledge
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist and essayist whose late masterpieces, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, place him among the greatest novelists in any language. This page collects quotes attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.”
Personal correspondence (1839), as quoted in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1971) by Konstantin Mochulski, as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17 -
“Letter to Mme. N. D. Fonvisin (1854), as published in Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends (1914), translated by Ethel Golburn Mayne, Letter XXI, p. 71”
I want to say to you, about myself, that I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism , and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully has it tormented me (and torments me even now) this longing for faith , which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it. And yet God gives me sometimes moments of perfect peace ; in such moments I lov -
“A Writer's Diary , Vol. 1: 1873-1876 , ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734”
Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea . And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul , for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone . -
“A Writer's Diary , Vol. 1: 1873-1876 (1994), pp. 161-162”
I think that the principal and most basic spiritual need of the Russian People is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything. I think the Russian People have been infused with this need to suffer from time immemorial. A current of martyrdom runs through their entire history, and it flows not only from external misfortunes and disasters but springs fro -
“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ . My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”
As quoted in Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane (1950) by Harold Victor Martin. | Variant translation. Last Notebook (1880–1881), Literaturnoe nasledstvo , 83: 696; as quoted in Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (2004), p. 21: "I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.