There is no official ranking, but the two sayings most associated with Dostoevsky are "Beauty will save the world," from The Idiot, and "If God does not exist, everything is permitted," attributed to The Brothers Karamazov. The author says neither of them, and the second does not appear in the book in that form.
The first comes from Part Three of The Idiot. It is spoken by Hippolyte, a young, ironic, tubercular man, who asks Prince Myshkin: "Is it true, Prince, that you once said that beauty will save the world?" He then shouts to everyone that the prince says so and mocks him: "What beauty will save the world!" The prince looks him over and does not answer. The phrase is therefore a question from an adversary, who attributes the idea to Myshkin and undoes it with irony. What the book does with it is put it to the test in the prince's life, not defend it in a speech.
The second is a formula made by readers. In the Russian text, the idea appears indirectly. In Book II, Miusov sums up what Ivan declared in a discussion: if faith in immortality disappears, "nothing will be immoral any longer, everything is permitted, even cannibalism." In Book XI, the servant Smerdyakov tells Ivan that he learned from him that "if the infinite God does not exist, there is no virtue at all, and then it would not be necessary." And the devil who visits Ivan says: "everything is permitted, and that's that!" The short formula sums up these passages, and Dmitri comes close to it in Book XI when he asks: without God and without a future life, then everything is permitted now, anything can be done? But no character says the conditional sentence exactly as it is.
It is wise to be wary of loose quotations attributed to Dostoevsky without a work, character, or chapter.
Sources
- Wikisource (russo): O Idiota, Parte III, capítulo V (texto original)
- Wikisource (russo): Os Irmãos Karamázov, Livro II, capítulo VI (texto original)
- Wikisource (russo): Os Irmãos Karamázov, Livro XI, capítulo VIII (texto original)
- Wikisource (russo): Os Irmãos Karamázov, Livro XI, capítulo IX (texto original)
- Wikipedia (inglês): The Idiot
- Wikipedia (inglês): The Brothers Karamazov