Crime and Punishment Quotes

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

When reason fails, the devil helps!

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.

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

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!

A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment-- as well as prison.

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.

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?

Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself.

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.

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

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

There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery.

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.

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

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

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

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.

Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.