If you’re looking for the best The Idiot quotes you’ve come to the right place. We compiled a list of 27 quotes that best summarise the message of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. Let these quotes inspire you!
The Idiot Quotes
We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
— 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
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
Why was “plain” a euphemism for “ugly, ” when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important things about her – something having to do with who she really was.
— Elif Batuman, The Idiot
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
Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
When you think about all the infinitely many galaxies and combinations of DNA, and against all those odds you meet this person – it’s a miracle…’ ‘Right, ‘ I said. I couldn’t imagine viewing Bill’s presence on Earth as any kind of a miracle, but wasn’t that itself the miracle – that love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up by how quantifiably lovable they are?
— Elif Batuman, The Idiot
A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
— 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
The Russian soul is a dark place.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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!…
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of…. Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I’m not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They’re always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people… The number of people who want to understand what you’re like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat – it’s really limited.
— Elif Batuman, 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
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.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
— Elif Batuman, The Idiot
Children can be told anything—anything. I’ve always been struck by seeing how little grown-up people understand children, how little parents even understand their own children. Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they are little and that it is too early for them to understand. What a miserable and unfortunate idea! And how readily the children detect that their fathers consider them too little to understand anything, though they understand everything. Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we really are: we are absurd, frivolous, we have bad habits, we’re bored, we don’t know how to look around ourselves, we don’t know how to understand, we are all like this, all of us, you, and I, and everyone! And you aren’t offended by my telling you straight to your faces that you are absurd? There is the basic stuff of life in your, isn’t there? You know, I believe it’s sometimes even good to be ridiculous. Yes, much better. People forgive each other more readily and become more humble, we can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin with perfection! To reach perfection there must first be much we do not understand. And if we understand too quickly we will probably not understand very well. I tell this to you who have been able to understand so much and – do not understand.’p. 577
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
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