Fyodor Dostoevsky Punishment Quotations

I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!

Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.

Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.

Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it's like a dream.

It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.

I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's.

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.