Here are the 63 best handpicked quotes from “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
From “Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.” to “A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.”
So if you want the best quotes from “Crime and Punishment,” then you’re in the right place.
Let’s get started!
My Favorite “Crime and Punishment” Quote
#1
“Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.”
— Crime and Punishment
In this quote, the crucial connection between intelligence, suffering, and sensitivity is highlighted.
It reminds me of a movie where a character expressed frustration about how deeply feeling individuals suffer due to their intense emotional connections to others’ lives.
However, the quote also offers an optimistic view of empathy: while feeling deeply may cause suffering, it also fosters growth and awareness of life’s complexities.
Best Handpicked Quotes From “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#2
“Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.”
— Crime and Punishment
#3
“The whole question here is: am I a monster, or a victim myself?”
— Crime and Punishment
#4
“You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.”
— Crime and Punishment
#5
“He walked on without resting. He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him – he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him….”
— Crime and Punishment
#6
“Walking along the crowded row, he met the one he used to know.”
— Crime and Punishment
#7
“If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be punishment as well as the prison.”
— Crime and Punishment
#8
“Everyone needs a somewhere, a place he can go. There comes a time, you see, inevitably there comes a time you have to have a somewhere you can go!”
— Crime and Punishment
#9
“She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age.”
— Crime and Punishment
#10
“He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story — the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.”
— Crime and Punishment
#11
”Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that’s even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary–never–no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.”
— Crime and Punishment
#12
“Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?”
— Crime and Punishment
#13
“Yours till death.”
— Crime and Punishment
#14
“It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.”
— Crime and Punishment
#15
“When reason fails, the devil helps!”
— Crime and Punishment
#16
“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner. and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
— Crime and Punishment
#17
“In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.”
— Crime and Punishment
#18
“It is man’s unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!”
— Crime and Punishment
#19
“Life is given to me only once, and never will be again—I don’t want to sit waiting for universal happiness. I want to live myself; otherwise it’s better not to live at all.”
— Crime and Punishment
#20
“I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.”
— Crime and Punishment
#21
“She said nothing, she only looked at me without a word. But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don’t blame!”
— Crime and Punishment
#22
“A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity “on a square yard of space.”
— Crime and Punishment
#23
“Again it became suddenly plain and perceptible to him that he had just told a fearful lie – that he would never now be able to speak freely of everything – that he would never again be able to speak of anything to anyone.”
— Crime and Punishment
#24
“We’ve got facts,” they say. But facts aren’t everything; at least half the battle consists in how one makes use of them!”
— Crime and Punishment
#25
“I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I…I wanted to have the daring…and I killed her.”
— Crime and Punishment
#26
“Every man looks out for himself, and he has the happiest life who manages to hoodwink himself best of all.”
— Crime and Punishment
#27
“What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.”
— Crime and Punishment
#28
“He was crushed and even humiliated. He could have laughed at himself in his anger…. A dull animal rage boiled within him.”
— Crime and Punishment
#29
“But you are a great sinner, that’s true,” he added almost solemnly, and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. Isn’t that fearful? Isn’t it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you’ve only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything?”
— Crime and Punishment
#30
“But his heart did not leave off. On the contrary, as though to spite him, it throbbed more and more violently.”
— Crime and Punishment
#31
“That’s just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating – and then he eats you up.”
— Crime and Punishment
#32
“Reason is the slave of passion.”
— Crime and Punishment
#33
“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”
— Crime and Punishment
#34
“The most offensive is not their lying—one can always forgive lying—lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth—what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying….”
— Crime and Punishment
#35
“Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”
— Crime and Punishment
#36
“Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”
— Crime and Punishment
#37
“Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.”
— Crime and Punishment
#38
“What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”
— Crime and Punishment
#39
“Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.”
— Crime and Punishment
#40
“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?”
— Crime and Punishment
#41
“People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.”
— Crime and Punishment
#42
“Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself.”
— Crime and Punishment
#43
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
— Crime and Punishment
#44
“Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.”
— Crime and Punishment
#45
“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
— Crime and Punishment
#46
“Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.”
— Crime and Punishment
#48
“Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?” Marmeladov’s question came suddenly into his mind “for every man must have somewhere to turn…”
— Crime and Punishment
#49
“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”
— Crime and Punishment
#50
“Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it … one must have the courage to dare.”
— Crime and Punishment
#51
“The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.”
— Crime and Punishment
#52
“And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink…. I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!”
— Crime and Punishment
#53
“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”
— Crime and Punishment
#54
“Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts.”
— Crime and Punishment
#55
“We’re always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can’t help feeling that that’s what it is.”
— Crime and Punishment
#56
“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”
— Crime and Punishment
#57
“I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.”
— Crime and Punishment
#58
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
— Crime and Punishment
#59
“In flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.”
— Crime and Punishment
#60
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”
— Crime and Punishment
#61
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
— Crime and Punishment
#62
“Fear gained more and more mastery over him, especially after this second, quite unexpected murder.”
— Crime and Punishment
#63
“A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.”
— Crime and Punishment