Ivan Turgenev Quotes
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Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
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The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.
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Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
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A person who gets angry at his own illness is sure to overcome it.
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The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?
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Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn't abide such happiness and ran away.
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In my case there was no first love. I began with the second.
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To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
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We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.
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In the end, nature is inexorable: it has no reason to hurry and, sooner or later, it takes what belongs to it. Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to its own laws, it doesn't know art, just as it doesn't know freedom, just as it doesn't know goodness.
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That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.
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There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.
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The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.
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I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.
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I never started from ideas but always from character.
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I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind.
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A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.
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Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.
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Go forward while you can, but if your strength fails you, sit down near the road and gaze without anger or envy at those who pass by. They don't have far to go, either.
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Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late.
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Oh, gentle feelings, soft sounds, the goodness and the gradual stilling of a soul that has been moved; the melting happiness of the first tender, touching joys of love- where are you?
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Every man's happiness is built on the unhappi-ness of another.
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Love isn't actually a feeling at all – it's an illness, a certain condition of body and soul.... Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will – just like cholera or a fever.
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Significance is sweet.