A selection of enduring sayings attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky, the celebrated Russian writer and one of the founders of the existentialist tradition:

It is no wonder that we are always made victims of the very shadows against which we once rebelled.

If you want truth to prevail in the world, first allow it to prevail over you.

To seek truth is to have the courage, when you see the light of truth, to stand before it and say: destroy all my desires; kill everything I had imagined to be the purpose of my life, and give me something better. The person I was is ready to die so that I may be born as the person I ought to become.

I have never been able to look at the heavens outside me and within me and say that there is no God. But I know that whether God exists or not, we are compelled to assume responsibility for our own perfection and for the suffering of becoming complete.

I have always believed that hell is nothing other than the inability to love other people and the world.

How can one stand before a sinner and a criminal without trembling inwardly at the thought that I am as much a sinner as the person standing before me?
The easiest thing in the world is to condemn a criminal; the most difficult is to understand what has happened to that person that made such an act possible. To ask this question is to be compelled to look into our own darkness and to recognise that each of us carries within ourselves a criminal, a murderer and a sinner.

A person who lies to himself and listens to his own lies will eventually reach a point where he can no longer see or understand the difference between truth and falsehood, either within himself or in the world outside. Little by little he will lose respect both for himself and for others.

Love is that precious treasure with which you can make the whole world your own, and with which you may redeem and liberate not only yourself but all human beings from their sins.