Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

When death comes, it is not enough to have been charitable; and it is not right to touch the body or lay it out for a couple of hours; for the soul should be given time to fight for itself, and to go up to judgment.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.

My feeling is, personally, I want to die first... because I believe that when you die, your soul goes immediately up for judgment - and I don't want my wife up there first. No, the judgment will be horrendous.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried: one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world, 'Where my best friends, my kindred dwell, where God, my Saviour, reigns.'

Holly died without a friend to hold her hand. Artemis felt her go, another gift of the magic. He kept on counting, brushing away the tears on his cheeks.

Death, lonely death, Beneath the withered leaves.

Just pity him, my boy. Tomorrow we'll be on our way, but he'll have to keep his own disagreeable company until the day he dies.

He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

At the hour of death when we all come face to face with God we are going to be judged on love: how much we have loved, not how much we have done but how much love we have put in our action.

I like to think that when I fall, A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea, This shelf of books along the wall, Beside my bed, will mourn for me.

I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.

I thought that it's so sad there are people who live their entire lives lonely. They die and no one goes to their funeral. I thought about how sad that was and how so many people out there have that path. I know this sounds weird, but if I could go take their bones back to my house and appreciate them for what they are, it would be my way of taking that loneliness away.

but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

We sometimes confuse sin with sinner, and we condemn too quickly and with too little compassion. We know from modern revelation that ‘the worth of souls is great in the sight of God.’ We cannot gauge the worth of another soul any more than we can measure the span of the universe.

There are moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply--and the thought of Death as a friend. This is the simplest of thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.

What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret instinct of decaying nature, or the soul's impulsive throb, as immortality draws on? Be what it may, it rested in the heart of Eva, a calm, sweet, prophetic certainty that Heaven was near; calm as the light of sunset, sweet as the bright stillness of autumn, there her little heart reposed, only troubled by sorrow for those who loved her so dearly.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.

You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.