Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 21

Love was something different. Love was pure delight, a fountain of emotions, sensual delights, and enjoying spending time together.
Sergei Lukyanenko
Even a best fountain-pen cannot make a writer be a fount of eloquence, but fountains teach to sob with ecstasy.
Lara Biyuts
And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.
Vasily Grossman
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
What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is in essence, simply human nature. All the worlds nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another. The foundation of any national character is human nature. The foundation of national character is simply a particular colouring taken on by human nature, a particular crystallisation of it.
Vasily Grossman
The true champions of a nation's freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found.
Vasily Grossman
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.
Ivan Turgenev
Doesn't there, in fact, exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his own very best interests, or - not to violate logic - some best good ... which is more important and higher than any other good, and for the sake of which man is prepared if necessary to go against all the laws, against, that is, reason, honour, peace and quiet, prosperity - in short against all those fine and advantageous things - only to attain that primary, best good which is dearer to him than all else?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even it if goes wrong, it lives.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The prison inspector and the warders, though they had never understood or gone into the meaning of these dogmas and of all that went on in church, believed that they must believe, because the higher authorities and the Tsar himself believed in it. Besides, though faintly (and themselves unable to explain why), they felt that this faith defended their cruel occupations. If this faith did not exist it would have been more difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to use all their powers to torment people, as they were now doing, with a quiet conscience. The inspector was such a kind-hearted man that he could not have lived as he was now living unsupported by his faith.
Leo Tolstoy
In a war the most dangerous thing is to understand the enemy. To understand is to forgive. And wehave no right to do that—we never have had, not since the creation of the world.
Sergei Lukyanenko
In any event, we must remember that it's not the blinded wrongdoers who are primarily responsible for the triumph of evil in the world, but the spiritually sighted servants of the good.
Fyodor Stepun
It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You look into it , the object flies off into air , your reasons evaporate , the criminal is not to be found , the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom , something like the toothache , for which no one is to blame , and consequently there is only the same outlet left again — that is , to beat the wall as hard as you can . So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause . And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings , blindly , without reflection , without a primary cause , repelling consciousness at least for a time ; hate or love , if only not to sit with your hands folded . The day after tomorrow , at the latest , you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself . Result : a soap - bubble and inertia . Oh , gentlemen , do you know , perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man , only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Everyone must look out for himself, and the best time is had by those who're best able to decieve themselves.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
...everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I was told that this road would take me to the ocean of death, and turned back halfway. Since then crooked, round-about, godforsaken paths stretch out before me.
Arkady Strugatsky
Life is a movie. You are the director in it. The choices you make, are the things that you will see. After you make a choice, there will be no going back, only simple things that will erase it.
Victoriya Anissimova
All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.
Leo Tolstoy
The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
This gentleman evidently belonged to the category of those people who wish the Government to interfere in everything, even in their daily quarrels with their wives.
Nikolai Gogol
In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service.
Leo Tolstoy
Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.
Leo Tolstoy
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
Oh, I have always been proud, I always wanted all or nothing! You see it was just because I am not one who will accept half a happiness, but always wanted all
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but where is there any mirth in our time, and do people know how to be mirthful?... A man's mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how we weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I broke your heart.Now barefoot I treadon shards.
Vera Pavlova
Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!
Leo Tolstoy
Shukhov had been told that this old man'd been in camps and prisons more years than you could count and had never come under any amnesty. When one ten-year stretch was over they slapped on another. Shukhov took a good look at him close up. In the camp you could pick him out among all the men with their bent backs because he was straight as a ramrod. When he sat at the table it looked like he was sitting on something to raise himself up higher. There hadn't been anything to shave off his head for a long time-he'd lost all his hair because of the good life. His eyes didn't shift around the mess hall all the time to see what was going on, and he was staring over Shukhov's head and looking at something nobody else could see. He ate his thin gruel with a worn old wooden spoon, and he took his time. He didn't bend down low over the bowl like all the others did, but brought the spoon up to his mouth. He didn't have a single tooth either top or bottom-he chewed the bread with his hard gums like they were teeth. His face was all worn-out but not like a goner's-it was dark and looked like it had been hewed out of stone. And you could tell from his big rough hands with the dirt worked in them he hadn't spent many of his long years doing any of the soft jobs. You could see his mind was set on one thing-never to give in. He didn't put his eight ounces of bread in all the filth on the table like everybody else but laid it on a clean little piece of rag that'd been washed over and over again.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If you want to be happy, be so.
Kozma Prutkov
A protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work.
Trotsky
It is pride that makes error and discord among men.
Leo Tolstoy
The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.
Gary Shteyngart
Maturity is for serious people. Let us be immature and have endless fun.
Ksenia Anske
God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten.
Andreï Makine
I give you," said Alexander, glancing at her, "what you need most from me.
Paulina Simons
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy
Vladimir Nabokov
This is days and days and months and years and all the minutes in between, just you me.
Paullina Simons
She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.
Leo Tolstoy
...as I was sifting through a heap of old and new "identity cards," I noticed that something was missing: my identity.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Questions about her feelings, about what has been or might be going on in her soul are non of my business; they are the business of her conscience and belong to religion.
Leo Tolstoy
Now, think of a square, a living, beautiful square. And imagine that it must tell you about itself, about its life. You understand, a square would scarcely ever think of telling you that all its four angles are equal: this has become so natural, so ordinary to it that it's simply no longer consciously aware of it. And so with me: I find myself continually in this square's position.
Zamyatin Yevgeny
I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos.
Mikhail Gorbachev
Psychic power is the ability to download information directly from the Universe.
Lada Ray
The universe was full of wonders. Some of them would drive you insane if you thought about them too long.
Ilona Andrews
The central fact of biblical history, the birth of the Messiah, more than any other, presupposes the design of Providence in the selecting and uniting of successive producers, and the real, paramount interest of the biblical narratives is concentrated on the various and wondrous fates, by which are arranged the births and combinations of the 'fathers of God.' But in all this complicated system of means, having determined in the order of historical phenomena the birth of the Messiah, there was no room for love in the proper meaning of the word. Love is, of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ. The sacred book does not say that Abram took Sarai to wife by force of an ardent love, and in any case Providence must have waited until this love had grown completely cool for the centenarian progenitors to produce a child of faith, not of love. Isaac married Rebekah not for love but in accordance with an earlier formed resolution and the design of his father. Jacob loved Rachel, but this love turned out to be unnecessary for the origin of the Messiah. He was indeed to be born of a son of Jacob - Judah - but the latter was the offspring, not of Rachel but of the unloved wife, Leah. For the production in the given generation of the ancestor of the Messiah, what was necessary was the union of Jacob precisely with Leah; but to attain this union Providence did not awaken in Jacob any powerful passion of love for the future mother of the 'father of God' - Judah. Not infringing the liberty of Jacob's heartfelt feeling, the higher power permitted him to love Rachel, but for his necessary union with Leah it made use of means of quite a different kind: the mercenary cunning of a third person - devoted to his own domestic and economic interests - Laban. Judah himself, for the production of the remote ancestors of the Messiah, besides his legitimate posterity, had in his old age to marry his daughter-in-law Tamar. Seeing that such a union was not at all in the natural order of things, and indeed could not take place under ordinary conditions, that end was attained by means of an extremely strange occurrence very seductive to superficial readers of the Bible. Nor in such an occurrence could there be any talk of love. It was not love which combined the priestly harlot Rahab with the Hebrew stranger; she yielded herself to him at first in the course of her profession, and afterwards the casual bond was strengthened by her faith in the power of the new God and in the desire for his patronage for herself and her family. It was not love which united David's great-grandfather, the aged Boaz, with the youthful Moabitess Ruth, and Solomon was begotten not from genuine, profound love, but only from the casual, sinful caprice of a sovereign who was growing old.
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov
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
I defendNot my voice, but my silence
Anna Akhmatova
I'm a master of speaking silently—all my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Secret to what?""Secret to shutting you up," he said. "I just have to beat you till you're half-dead, then give you chicken soup and"--he raised his hands--"blessed silence.
Ilona Andrews
I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
Nadezhda Mandelstam
On Sundays Mom invariably ran out of money, which is when she cracked eggs into the skillet over cubes of fried black sourdough bread. It was, I think, the most delicious and eloquent expression of pauperism.
Anya von Bremzen
You can do without sleep or without food, but not without both and sleep wasn't an option.
Ilona Andrews
Back at the Davydokovo apartment, we sat mesmerized in front of Grandad's Avantgard brand TV. It was all porn all the time. Porn in three flavors: 1)Tits and asses; 2) gruesome close-ups of dead bodies from war or crimes; 3) Stalin. Wave upon wave of previously unseen documentary footage of the Generalissimo. Of all the porn, number three was the most lurid. The erotics of power.
Anya von Bremzen
Shukhov ate his supper without bread--a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he'd save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly--it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence...To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.
Alexander Schmemann