Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 4

Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity. I stretched out my arms to them in my despair, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I had done all this, I alone, that I had brought them corruption, contagion, and lies!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. tIf someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say:t'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!
Anton Chekhov
The noontide of my life is starting,Which I must needs accept, I know;But oh, my light youth, if we're parting,I want you as a friend to go!My thanks to you for the enjoyments,The sadness and the pleasant torments,The hubbub, storms, festivity,For all that you have given me;My thanks to you. I have delightedIn you when times were turbulent,When times were calm... to full extent;Enough now! With a soul clear-sightedI set out on another questAnd from my old life take a rest.Let me glance back. Farewell, you arboursWhere, in the backwoods, I recallDays filled with indolence and ardoursAnd dreaming of a pensive soul.And you, my youthful inspiration,Keep stirring my imagination,My heart's inertia vivify,More often to my corner fly.Let not a poet's soul be frozen,Made rough and hard, reduced to boneAnd finally be turned to stoneIn that benumbing world he goes in,In that intoxicating sloughWhere, friends, we bathe together now.
Alexander Pushkin
All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fear, raisingchildren for the executioner,prison, or the torture chamber.
Anna Akhmatova
I have inflammation of the imagination.
Lera Auerbach
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
Vladimir Lenin
Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed,And stands there like a window open wideInto a hushed and brightly lit abodeWhere something dreadful has occurred inside.
Anna Akhmatova
Then she would wander through fields, over simple, poor land, looking carefully and keenly all round her, still getting used to being alive in the world, and feeling glad that everything in it was right for her — for her body, her heart, and her freedom.
Andrei Platonov
Remember young man, unceasingly,' Father Paissy began, without preface, 'that the science of this world, which has become a great power, has, especially in the last century, analysed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only analysed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous. Yet the whole world still stands steadfast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it Has it not lasted nineteen centuries, is it not still a living, a moving power in the individual soul and in the masses of the people? It is still as strong and living even in the souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you’ve been exiled, why don’t you send me word of yourself? People do send word. Have you stopped loving me? No, for some reason I don’t believe that. It means you were exiled and died … Release me, then, I beg you, give me freedom to live, finally, to breathe the air! …’ Margarita Nikolaevna answered for him herself: ’You are free … am I holding you?’ Then she objected to him: ’No, what kind of answer is that? No, go from my memory, then I’ll be free …
Mikhail Bulgakov
One should never direct people towards happiness, becausehappiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should directthem towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its preycan be happy too, but only human beings can feel affectionfor each other, and this is the highest achievement they canaspire to.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.
Boris Pasternak
Did those nice church ladies come by again?" He nodded. "I asked them if a man died and then the woman remarried, and then the three of them met in heaven, would it be a sin for them to have a threesome, since they were all married in God's eye. And they decided they were late to be somewhere else.
Ilona Andrews
To begin with, I had never done any good deeds; besides, even if I had simply fabricated a few, I would not have enjoyed going on about them.
M. Ageyev
There has been a rediscovery of the meaning of baptism as entrance and integration into the Church, of "ecclesiological" significance. But ecclesiology, unless it is given its true cosmic perspective ("for the life of the world"), unless it is understood as the christian form of "cosmology," is always ecclesiolatry, the Church considered as a "being in itself" and not the new relation of god, man and the world.
Alexander Schmemann
The judge's massive eyebrows crept up. "Kaldar. Are you the one speaking for the plaintiff today?" "Yes, Your Honor.""Well, shit," Dobe said. "I guess you're familiar with the law. You hit it over the head, set its house on fire, and got its sister pregnant.
Ilona Andrews
It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.
Pyotr Kropotkin
Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.
Osip Mandelstam
Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?
Leo Tolstoy
On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
Leo Tolstoy
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But how did I murder her? Is that how men do murders? Do men go to commit a murder as I went then? I will tell you some day how I went! Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself once for all, for ever.… But it was the devil that killed that old woman, not I. Enough, enough, Sonia, enough! Let me be!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Probably, sooner or later every person founds oneself to be needless.
Igor Eliseev
It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed.” Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quote: “Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.” Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad.
Vladimir Nabokov
Since I can remember, for some reason, I was always “not like others,” and it was presented by everyone like there was something wrong with me; only becoming more grown up and mature, I realized that to be special and different from the crowd is my biggest value and happiness.
Sahara Sanders
You can't push me away, mio cuore. You can't!
Olga Goa
Because he has the best equipment in the City and he knows how to use it!
Ilona Andrews
You were right," said the Master impressed by the neatness of Korovyov's work, "when you said: no documents, no person. So that means I don't exist since I don't have any documents.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.
Kollontai Alexandra
The art of creation is older than the art of killing.
Andrei Voznesensky
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
Leo Tolstoy
All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Never give in to peer pressure, especially if the peer is not attractive.
Eugene Mirman
...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently.
Boris Pasternak
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.
Vladimir Nabokov
The important thing is not to lie to yourself. He who lies to himself and listens to his own lies reaches a state in which he no longer recognizes truth either in himself or in others, and so he ceases to respect both himself and others. Having ceased to respect everyone, he stops loving, and then, in the absence of love, in order to occupy and divert himself, he abandons himself to passions and the gratification of coarse pleasures until his vices bring him down to the level of bestiality, and all on account of his being constantly false both to himself and to others.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.
Leo Tolstoy
In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
Leo Tolstoy
When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?
Vasily Grossman
When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.
Boris Pasternak
All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I have even heard it said that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.
Maxim Gorky
They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.
Leo Tolstoy
And was it his destined part / Only one moment in his life / To be close to your heart?
Ivan Turgenev
To love life is to love God.
Leo Tolstoy
Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
So you say faith is not enough for you and you want knowledge, too. But knowledge does not involve spiritual effort; knowledge is obvious. Faith assumes effort. Knowledge is repose and faith is motion.
Evgenij Vodolazkin
An evil spark flared in his eyes. "Trade: raccoon for some answers.
Ilona Andrews
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
Maxim Gorky
People are made in such a way that if something inexplicable happens to them, they write it off to an overheated imagination.
Max Frei
Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.
Leon Trotsky
I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Help me, I can’t breathe, your ego is pushing all the air out of the room.
Ilona Andrews
Whatever they say about it, but being altruistic is not so simple for everyone. Not to look and sound like despotism, altruism must be learnt, and it’s a long way, which in fact begins from our egoism, for really, a human can’t love others if he doesn’t love himself first.
Lara Biyuts
She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bach felt the beauty and sadness of the moment. These men who defied the power of the Russian heavy artillery, these coarse, hardened soldiers who were dispirited by their lack of ammunition and tormented by vermin and hunger had all understood at once that what they needed more than anything in the world was not bread, not bandages, not ammunition, but these tiny branches twined with useless tinsel, these orphanage toys.
Vasily Grossman