Ivan Turgenev Quotes
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A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?
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A person who gets angry at his own illness is sure to overcome it.
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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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Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.
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The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?
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I was afraid of looking into my heart...afraid of thinking seriously about anything...I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved.
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Anyone who has crossed from the district of Bolkhov into that of Zhizdra will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the provinces of Orel and Kaluga.
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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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To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
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The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.
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I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.
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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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The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.
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I never started from ideas but always from character.
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If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.
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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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I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind.
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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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Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late.
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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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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.