Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 2

was coming to that troubled twilight time, a time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth is past but old age has not yet come.
Ivan Turgenev
It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed or not possible to avoid making those that are required.
Ivan Goncharov
Let's make our existence more joyous, fulfilled and full of positive adventures... Let's add more vivid colors to life in the world around us: making it happier, merrier, easier, healthier, tastier and brighter! Our project is a constant source of inspiration to support these ideas.
Sahara Sanders
Can it be thattheir prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love,sacred devoted love, is not all powerful? Oh, no! Howeverpassionate, sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, theflowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes;they tell us not only of eternal peace, of that great peace of"indifferent" nature; they tell us also of eternal reconciliation andof life without end.
Ivan Turgenev
The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.
Leo Tolstoy
Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge.
Lev Shestov
Another fact that allowed Fascism to gain power over men was their blindness. A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed. The optimism of people standing on the edge of the grave is astounding.
Vasily Grossman
On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.
Vladimir Nabokov
Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.
Maxim Gorky
Let my notes, like the most sensitive seismograph, record the curve of even the most insignificant vibrations of my brain: for it is precisely such vibrations that are sometimes the forewarning of...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.
Leo Tolstoy
I think the motive force of all our action is, after all, personal happiness.
Leo Tolstoy
We must endure, Alyosha." That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people — of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance.
Maxim Gorky
Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rare and powerful harmonies exist,Shaping both scent and contour in a flower.Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until,Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond.And thus do images of fleeting vision,Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky,Once turned to stone live on from age to age,Held always in a faultless, polished phrase.("A Sonnet To Form")
Valery Bryusov
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.
Igor Stravinsky
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Nikita Khrushchev
I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.
Mikhail Lermontov
I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The illness of a doctor is always worse than the illnesses of his patients.The patients only feel, but the doctor, as well as feeling, has a pretty good idea of the destructive effect of the disease on his constitution.This is a case in which knowledge brings death nearer.
Maxim Gorky
I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old.
Leo Tolstoy
If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
you might want to decide fast. We live in a dangerous world. If you see a chance to be happy, you have to fight for it, so later you have no regrets.
Ilona Andrews
A long while yet will you keep that great mother's grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.
Alexander Pushkin
The queen who mended her stockings in prison must have looked every inch a queen and even more a queen than at sumptuous banquets and levees.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I've ceased to smile long ago, The bitter winds now chill my lips, Another hope was just let go, Another song was added since. Against my will, I'll cede this song To people's laughter and offense, Because love's silence for the soul Is too unbearably immense.
Anna Akhmatova
Weak people never put an end to things themselves. They always wait for the end.
Ivan Turgenev
The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
I’m getting off the boat at Coconut Grove. It’s six and you’re not on the dock. I finish up, and start walking home, thinking you’re tied up making dinner, and then I see you and Ant hurrying down the promenade. He is running and you’re running after him. You’re wearing a yellow dress. He jumps on me, and you stop shyly, and I say to you, come on, tadpole, show me what you got, and you laugh and run and jump into my arms. Such a good memory.I love you, babe.
Paullina Simons
Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people’s hearts and instructs them,… Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document…
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Do you know, Alexey Fyodorovitch, how people do go out of their mind?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Life IS a competition. ALWAYS. No matter whether any of us want it to be or not!
Sahara Sanders
No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageThe painted parchment papering our cage:Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenonThe iridule - when, beautiful and strange,In a bright sky above a mountain rangeOne opal cloudlet in an oval formReflects the rainbow of a thunderstormWhich in a distant valley has been staged -For we are most artistically caged.
Vladimir Nabokov
Any idiot can face a crisis-it's day to day living that wears you out.
Anton Chekhov
I think the word ‘pleasure’ is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning.
Olga Goa
I trusted her about as far as I could throw her. I was strong and she was small, but it still wasn't very far.
Ilona Andrews
The sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
People have no limits either in love or in hatred. But is it their fault? They despise us because they are afraid, for we remind them that getting crippled or sick might happen to anyone; or, perhaps, the true reason of their hatred lies much deeper inside, stemming from the hidden ugliness of their own souls?
Igor Eliseev
Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.
Maxim Gorky
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights
Garry Kasparov
Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.
Leo Tolstoy
Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!
Leon Trotsky
it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.
Leo Tolstoy
Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.
Leo Tolstoy
To think too much is a disease.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Men never understand what honor is, though they're always talking about it
Leo Tolstoy
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
Boris Pasternak
Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper.
Ellie Midwood
The atmosphere of a date is everything.
Sahara Sanders
There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all. Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan's pride and murmuring against God.The Brothers KaramazovBook VI - The Russian Monk, Chapter 3 - Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zosima.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.
Andrei Tarkovsky
We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.
Vladimir Nabokov
I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)
Vladimir Nabokov
...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
Leon Trotsky