Fyodor Dostoevsky Suffering Quotations

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

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.

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

Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.

Only through suffering can we find ourselves.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

On our earth we can only love withsuffering and through suffering.

I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!

Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.

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!

And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.

I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.

And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?

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.

I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but perhaps we'd better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.

I want to suffer so that I may love.

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

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

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

There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

What is hell?...The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...