Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 5

... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.
Lev S. Vygotsky
The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We have conquered everything, and everything has slipped out of our grasp.
Victor Serge
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.
Modest Mussorgsky
Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can … Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.
Keith Gessen
The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!
Mikhail Bulgakov
A man and a woman marry because both of them don't know what to do with themselves.
Anton Chekhov
He was holding his right leg, but the blood soaked through his fingers and flowed over his hand onto his sleeve. Intuition had served me again this time: my kick had knocked his automatic out of his grasp a fraction of a second before he could press the trigger. The second kick was to his face. It sent him flying about six feet. I set my sights on his head, but something stopped me, one of our guys let out a yelp behind me. Another bullet whistled by right next to me. Apparently, this Mujahadeen was not the only one here. Again, I aimed at his head, but something again stopped me. I saw how his hands were trembling. I noticed the horror in his eyes. 'He is only a boy!' I thought and pressed the trigger.
Vladislav Tamarov
I would say that Op 31 had brought music just to the very edge … I just simply drew back and said, “beyond that lies complete chaos”.
Leo Ornstein
Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the 'wee ones,' because there are little children and big children. All people are 'wee ones.' And I'll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
Vladimir Nabokov
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov
Truth with love is a lie
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I swear I won't touch you even with a finger until you ask me yourself.
Olga Goa
You can do without sleep or without food, but not without both and sleep wasn't an option.
Ilona Andrews
I like American women. They do things sexually Russian girls would never dream of doing - like showering.
Yakov Smirnoff
Only one who loves can remember so well.
Anton Chekhov
In matters of conscience and basic convictions it is unlawful and pernicious for anyone to forcibly intrude upon another's beliefs; therefore, because I am a man of rational convictions, I will not go out and demolish churches, drown monks, or rip down icons from my friends' walls because in so doing I will not spread my convictions; human beings must be educated, not coerced, I am not the enemy, I am not the tyrant of the conscience of true believers.
N.G. Pomyalovsky
Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.
Vladimir Nabokov
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.
Gary Shteyngart
He was a committed ladies' man and obtained a great deal of sustenance from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of women, but he guarded himself vigilantly against addiction, fearful of becoming fodder for that feminine allure which is so paradoxically generous to those who take from it and so destructively cruel to those who give.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.
Daniil Kharms
Recalling former years’ romances,Recalling love that time enhances,With tenderness, with not a care,Alive, at liberty once more,We drank, in mute intoxication,The breath of the indulgent night!Just as a sleepy convict mightBe carried from incarcerationInto a greenwood, so were weBorne to our youth by reverie.
Alexander Pushkin
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same.
Maxim Gorky
Love those you hate you.
Leo Tolstoy
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
Leo Tolstoy
Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.
Leo Tolstoy
I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
Gary Shteyngart
A few days earlier, in front of his guests at his own birthday celebration, this man had started smashing his own crockery and tearing his and his wife's clothes, because he was not offered enough vodka; then he went on to break every stick of furniture in his house and smash all the windows, and he did it all for the "beauty" of the gesture, as Mr. Karamazov had just now.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man is a vile creature!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.
Leo Tolstoy
Vronsky meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. When first he united his life with hers and donned civilian clothes, he felt the delight of freedom in general, such as he had not before known, and also the freedom of love—he was contented then, but not for long. Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires—boredom. Involuntarily he began to snatch at every passing caprice, mistaking it for a desire and a purpose.
Leo Tolstoy
What did I tell you about plastic ties? Only for humans, Julie murmured.If you don't listen to me, I can't teach you anything.
Ilona Andrews
I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating - a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that'll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist. Well, of course, it's clear that you can't establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe," if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering… since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?
Vladimir Nabokov
Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
Men always did and always will err and nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
Leo Tolstoy
Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Leo Tolstoy
Others are not born bad or good... and neither are people, by the way.
Sergei Lukyanenko
That's one huge puppy.
Ksenia Anske
True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know.
Anton Chekhov
I know human nature. We might sacrifice a few, because we are stupid and hardwired for group survival. But we would never die in the thousands because a god wished it. Those kinds of numbers require material gains, like power, wealth, territory.
Ilona Andrews
The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.
Dmitry Merezhkovsky
I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos.
Mikhail Gorbachev
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
Mikhail Bakunin
Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.
Ivan Turgenev
I've an insatiable craving inside me that consumes everything and makes me regard the sufferings and joys of others only in their relationship to me, as food to sustain my spiritual powers. I am no longer capable of loosing my head in love, Ambition has been crushed in me by circumstances, but it has come out in another way, for ambition is nothing but a lust for power and my chief delight is to dominate those around me. To inspire in others love, devotion, fear - isn't that the first symptom and the supreme triumph of power? To cause another person suffering or joy, having no right to do so - isn't that the sweetest food of pride?
Mikhail Lermontov
He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
Leo Tolstoy
Is that vodka?' Margarita asked weakly. The cat jumped up from its chair in indignation. 'Excuse me, your majesty,' he squeaked, 'do you think I would give vodka to a lady? That is pure spirit!
Mihail Bulhakov
While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything.
Leo Tolstoy
The process of creation can be unpredictable and, in some way, similar to love: the brightest waves of inspiration may sometimes occur in wrong timing, wrong places, or even with wrong people.
Sahara Sanders
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
Leo Tolstoy
Curran looked back at me. "Why is it you always attract creeps?""You tell me." Ha! Walked right into that one, yes, he did.
Ilona Andrews