Quotes · verified word for word in the text
The Idiot quotes
11 quotes from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #2638 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
‘beauty would save the world’?
— Spoken by a character · III. I
It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise!
— Spoken by a character · IV. I
A fool with a heart and no brains is just as unhappy as a fool with brains and no heart. I am one and you are the other, and therefore both of us suffer, both of us are unhappy.
— Spoken by a character · I. I
We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
I want to speak to at least one person, as I would to myself.
— Spoken by a character · III. I
One can tell a child everything, anything.
— Spoken by a character · I. I
There is something besides all this, something which the arguments of the atheists can never touch.
— Spoken by a character · II. I
Only God knows what may be hidden in the hearts of drunkards.’
— Spoken by a character · II. I
You are innocent—and in your innocence lies all your perfection—oh, remember that!
— Spoken by a character · III. I
Take no notice of that; I know that I have almost ceased to exist. God knows what it is dwelling within me now—it is not myself.
— Spoken by a character · III. I