- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
Please feel free to browse and borrow.
-
Quote Search
- 18,299 quotes and counting ...
Authors
Topic Cloud
action age America beauty belief change character death democracy education ego error evil faith fear freedom future God government happiness history humanity integrity justice leadership liberty life love morality perspective politics power pride progress reality religion science society success truth virtue war wealth wisdom writing- I've been adding topics since 2014, so not all quotes have been given one. Full topic list.
Author Cloud
Adams, John • Aristotle • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterfield (Lord) • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Cicero, Marcus Tullius • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Sophocles • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Most Quoted Authors
Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (8,264)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (6,191)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (6,022)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,240)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,922)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,496)
- “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981) (4,067)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,982)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,776)
- Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907) (3,669)
Recent Feedback
- Snyder, Timothy - On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) | WIST on “Notes on Nationalism” (1945)
- Dave on Notice to email subscribers
- Nina on Notice to email subscribers
- ~~Admin - Notice to email subscribers | WIST on Subscribe/Feeds
- France, Anatole - (Spurious) | WIST on A Writer’s Notebook (1949)
- Dave on The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 6, l. 180ff [Odysseus to Nausicaa] (c. 700 BC) [tr. Rieu (1946)]
- Richard McBroom on “What I Believe,” Forum and Century (Oct 1930)
- Marcus Aurelius - (Spurious) | WIST on Meditations, Book 2, #11 [tr. Gill (2014)]
- Richard McBroom on “What I Believe,” Forum and Century (Oct 1930)
- Elizabeth II - Address to the Nation (5 Apr 2020) | WIST on “We’ll Meet Again” (1939) [with Hughie Charles]
WISTish
- * Visual quotes (graphics, memes) only
Quotations by Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
“Celebrating a Lie”
A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
“Critical Articles: Introduction,” Complete Collected Works (1895)
But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
(Attributed)
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
(Attributed)
Everything is in our own hands; only through sheer cowardice will it slip through our fingers.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
Crime and Punishment, 1.1 (1866)
Originality and the feeling of one’s own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
Diary of a Writer (1877)
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
Notes from the Underground (1864)
Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
Notes from the Underground (1864)
I am forty years old now, and forty years, after all, is a whole lifetime; after all, that is extremely old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners; it is vulgar, immoral.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
Notes from Underground, 1.1 (1864) [tr. Matlaw (1960)]
“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature — that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance — and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
The Brothers Karamazov, Part 2, book 5, ch. 4 [Ivan] (1880) [tr. Garnett (1912)]
There is no sin and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
The Brothers Karamazov, 2.3 [Fr. Zossima] (1880) [tr. Garnett (1912)]
The secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
The Brothers Karamazov, 5.5 [Grand Inquisitor] (1880) [tr. Garnett (1912)]
How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
The Brothers Karamazov, 6.2(f) [Father Zossima] (1880) [tr. Garnett (1912)]
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Russian novelist
The House of the Dead (1862) [tr. Garnett (1957)]
