“Beauty will save the world.”
As commonly credited to Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Credited to
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Actually said by
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, in a character’s voice
Findings
From The Idiot. At Prince Myshkin’s birthday party, Ippolit says he believes Myshkin once said it. Additionally, Adelaida says in an earlier chapter: “With such beauty as that one might overthrow the world.”
This is a bit of a meta-misquote, as the quote itself is a secondhand paraphrase of another character’s beliefs. Let it be known that this is the pernicious mechanism propagating the Misattribution Crisis.
The original
“Is it true, prince, that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world’?”