Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 18

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
Watch out, brother,' his professor had told him more than once, 'you have talent; it would be a sin to ruin it. But you're impatient. Some one thing entices you, some one thing takes your fancy––and you occupy yourself with it, and the rest can rot, you don't care about it, you don't even want to look at it. Watch out you don't turn into a fashionable painter. Even now your colors are beginning to cry a bit too loudly. Your drawing is imprecise, and sometimes quite weak, the line doesn't show; you go for fashionable lighting, which strikes the eye at once. Watch out or you'll fall into the English type. Beware. You already feel drawn to the world: every so often I see a showy scarf on your neck, a glossy hat ... It's enticing, you can start painting fashionable pictures, little portraits for money. But that doesn't develop talent, it ruins it. Be patient. Ponder over every work, drop showiness––let the others make money. You won't come out the loser.
Nikolai Gogol
everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.
Leo Tolstoy
True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know.
Anton Chekhov
He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.
Leo Tolstoy
On our earth we can only love sincerely with suffering and through suffering. We do not know how to love any other way and know no other love. I want to suffer so that I can love. I desire, I thirst in this moment to kiss, weeping tears, that very earth which I left and I do not desire or accept life on any other ! . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The earth is buzzing with metaphor
Osip Mandelstam
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
One day, she’d find a way to live her life to the fullest. She was sure of it. She just had no idea how she would manage it.
Ilona Andrews
For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name
Boris Pasternak
Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
Vladimir Nabokov
With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged.
Leo Tolstoy
Thought isn't a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes? That question has still not been answered.
Vladimir I. Vernadsky
Both David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh fell in the fight for freedom, the right of the Americans to be left alone.
Eduard Limonov
Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
Gary Shteyngart
After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.
Gary Shteyngart
They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes--que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!--while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.
Vladimir Nabokov
And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.
Gary Shteyngart
A Spaniard and a Pole worked in the barbershop where we got our hair cut. An Italian shined our shoes. A Croat washed our car. This was America.
Ilya Ilf
Every man has two counties--his own and America.
Max Lerner
Clearly it's not all that pacific on the Pacific Ocean
Ilya Ilf
This (San Francisco) is the most beautiful city in America, Probably because it looks nothing like America
Ilya Ilf
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
Boris Pasternak
Every command slaps liberty in the face.
Mikhail Bakhtin
Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We grew up in a place without a hint of love. Perhaps this was the single thing that bound us forever.
Vadim Babenko
I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us and the soul becomes anew what it once was and will surely be again
Mikhail Lermontov
We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death
Alexander Herzen
From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.
Vladimir Nabokov
What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues-innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection-are our sole objects of pursuit?
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 often think with regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood's days, for those days to come back to me!
Leo Tolstoy
Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.
Gary Shteyngart
what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?
Leo Tolstoy
...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
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
Vasily Grossman
I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgements must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.
Leo Tolstoy
Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
People are ignorant of what any street clock knows. Why? Because the crack that cleaves existence also swallows their existence-reflecting consciousnesses. Thrown back into existence, the poor souls don't suspect that a moment ago they didn't exist - and only isolated things and persons, swallowed by the crack never to return to this world, arouse a certain fear and foreboding.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
The people need poetry that will be their own secretTo keep them awake forever,And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.
Osip Mandelstam
If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It seems to me that the whole of human life can be summed up in the one statement that man only exists for the purpose of proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not an organ.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Sooner or later everything that exists ceases to exist, and then something comes along to take its place, but not always something better.
Dmitry Bakin
And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.
Anton Chekhov
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 people had attack dogs. Ghastek had attack lawyers.
Ilona Andrews
So crosses don't do anything against your kind?" Sean asked."No," Arland said. "There is no mystical force repelling us.""Then why?""We're forbidden to kill a creature in a moment of prayer or invocation of their deity. Well, we can, technically, but you have to do penance and purify yourself and nobody wants to spend weeks praying and bathing themselves in the sacred cave springs. The water's only a fraction warmer than ice. When one of you holds up a cross, it's difficult to determine whether you're praying, invoking, or just waving it around. So the sane strategy is to back away.
Ilona Andrews
Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
Leo Tolstoy
There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another.
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov
We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible.
Lev Shestov
Having learnt from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes this, and always expects the law he has learnt to be fulfilled.But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as before, yet when, under the same conditions and with the same character, he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels that, however impossible it may be, it is so, for without this conceptions of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single moment.He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.
Leo Tolstoy
...there is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
There is no feminine gaze that I would not forget at the sight of mountains covered with curly vegetation, and illumined by the southern sun, at the sight of the blue sky, or at the sound of a torrent that falls from crag to crag.
Mikhail Lermontov
Once taken by her, you glowedAnd you drank her poisons, content. Because all the stars seemed to grow,And fields had a different scent,Autumn fields.
Anna Akhmatova
I wasn't even that lovable to begin with. I was a selfish ass, but somehow something I did made this man love me, deeply and without reservations. He knew things about me that I would die to keep secret. I trusted him more than I trusted anyone in my life. I mattered to him. He was suffering and I wanted it to stop. I wanted to see him happy. I loved him so much.
Ilona Andrews
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.
Vladimir Nabokov