Ivan Turgenev Quotes
I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.
However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.
Behind me there are already so many memories (...) Lots of memories, but no point in remembering them, and ahead of me a long, long road with nothing to aim for ... I just don't want to go along it.
Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he's something innately superior, something eternal--and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.
What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
I was as happy as a fish in water, and I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.
What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?
Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we're absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.
A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.
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.
To tell about a drunken muzhik's beating his wife is incomparably harder than to compose a whole tract about the 'woman question.'
He was the soul of politeness to everyone -- to some with a hint of aversion, to others with a hint of respect.
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.
The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.
I only know that I feel tired, antiquated; I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.
I'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it.
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.
I want everything or nothing. A life for a life, taking one and giving up another without hesitation and beyond recall. Or else better have nothing!
You are an old pig!'one of them said to the other. 'And that is worse than being a young one.
And was it his destined part / Only one moment in his life / To be close to your heart?
It seemed to us that all people to a greater or lesser degree belong to one of these two types, that almost every one of us resembles either Don Quixote or Hamlet.
Weak people never put an end to things themselves. They always wait for the end.
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.
People without firmness of character love to make up a fate for themselves that relieves them of the necessity of having their own will and of taking responsibility for themselves.
