The price of loving someone very much is never loving anyone again.
Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky
Not found in their works No source has been found in Fyodor Dostoevsky's works.Draft entry, not yet reviewed
Where it really comes from
No such sentence occurs in the 19 works in the source texts (Poor Folk, White Nights, The House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, Bobok, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; and in Russian also Humiliated and Insulted, Winter Notes, The Eternal Husband, The Adolescent, The Meek One, the Writer's Diary, the Pushkin speech and the letters). The English texts were searched for 'price of loving', 'never love anyone again' and 'never loving'; the Russian for цена любви, никого не полюбит, больше никогда не полюбить and other wordings with любить and никогда. White Nights, the work it is sometimes pinned on, ends the other way: the dreamer, left alone, blesses the girl he lost and calls one moment of happiness enough for a whole life. The earliest trace found online is a Spanish note on Substack of 9 March 2026, without a name ('El precio de amar mucho a alguien es no ser capaz de amar de nuevo'); no earlier source and no real author were found. A kindred genuine line is Raskolnikov's cry in Crime and Punishment, Part 6, chapter 7: 'Oh, if only I were alone and no one loved me and I too had never loved anyone! Nothing of all this would have happened.'
Where it circulates
Circulates online as a one-line Dostoevsky quote about heartbreak, without a work. A Spanish form circulates too; a search result suggests that Turkish reading sites credit a Turkish form to White Nights (Beyaz Geceler), but the page could not be opened to check.
What it says
A love that is great enough uses up the capacity to love: after losing it, one cannot love anyone else.
Use with care
Not found in Dostoevsky. For a genuine line on lost love, use the ending of White Nights ('a whole moment of happiness').
Forms in circulation
- meme
El precio de amar mucho a alguien es no ser capaz de amar de nuevo.
Spanish form, posted without an author's name.seen
Tags
What it is made of
Nearby
- My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life? related
- What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. related
- Loving someone means giving them power to destroy you and trusting they won't. alike 65%
- Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. alike 64%
- I was burning, while you came blaming me for the smell of ashes. alike 63%
- The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God! alike 59%
Checked against
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