Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 23

You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man has no individual i. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "i"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "i". And each time his i is different. just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You think it’s because they’re lying? Nonsense! I like it when people lie! Lying is man’s only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie--you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that’s honorable in its way; well, but we can’t even lie with our own minds! Lie to me, but in your own way, and I’ll kiss you for it. Lying in one’s own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else’s way; in the first case you’re a man, and in the second—no better than a bird! The truth won’t go away, but life can be nailed shut; there are examples. Well, so where are we all now? With regard to science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aspirations, liberalism, reason, experience, and everything, everything, everything, we’re all, without exception, still sitting in the first grade! We like getting by on other people’s reason--we’ve acquired a taste for it! Right? Am I right?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
we people at the bottom feel everything; but it is hard for us to speak out our hearts. our thoughts float about in us. we are ashamed because, although we understand, we are not able to express them; an often from shame we are angry at our thoughts, and at those who inspire them. we drive them away from ourselves
Maxim Gorky
The human feelings, which had never been very deep in him, grew shallower every hour, and every day something more dropped away from the decrepit wreck.
Nikolai Gogol
Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?
Leo Tolstoy
When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair.
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Anger - a better alternative to caffeine.
Ilona Andrews
Some believe that every library looks like a splendid cemetery of human thoughts and ideas. Could librarians be called grave-diggers? However that may be, like a cemetery, a library will never stop being of use.
Lara Biyuts
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
in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.
Semen Frank
Going to see plays isn't what you people should do. Try looking at yourselves a little more often and see what gray lives you all lead. How much of what you say is unnecessary.
Anton Chekhov
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
G.I. Gurdjieff
April 43rd 2000Today is the day of great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me. I only discovered this today. Frankly, it all came to me in a flash.
Nikolai Gogol
Today we're younger than we're ever gonna be
Regina Spektor
One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well—some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope''No,' she said smiling, 'no.''It would have made all the difference,' said Humbert Humbert.Then I pulled out my automatic-I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it.
Vladimir Nabokov
As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days—four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory
Vladimir Nabokov
We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we're not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we'll go fucking nuclear on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips.
Gary Shteyngart
The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.
Gary Shteyngart
You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
Gary Shteyngart
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.
Osip Mandelstam
[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.
Joseph Brodsky
What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.
Mikhail Bakhtin
As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.
Mikhail Bakhtin
The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.
Anton Chekhov
Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't change.
Victor Pelevin
The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it."The prince paused and all waited, expecting him to go on again and finish the story."Is that all?" asked Aglaya."All? Yes," said the prince, emerging from a momentary reverie."And why did you tell us this?""Oh, I happened to recall it, that's all! It fitted into the conversation—""You probably wish to deduce, prince," said Alexandra, "that moments of time cannot be reckoned by money value, and that sometimes five minutes are worth priceless treasures. All this is very praiseworthy; but may I ask about this friend of yours, who told you the terrible experience of his life? He was reprieved, you say; in other words, they did restore to him that 'eternity of days.' What did he do with these riches of time? Did he keep careful account of his minutes?""Oh no, he didn't! I asked him myself. He said that he had not lived a bit as he had intended, and had wasted many, and many a minute.""Very well, then there's an experiment, and the thing is proved; one cannot live and count each moment; say what you like, but one cannot." "That is true," said the prince, "I have thought so myself. And yet, why shouldn't one do it?""You think, then, that you could live more wisely than other people?" said Aglaya."I have had that idea.""And you have it still?""Yes — I have it still," the prince replied.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I clearly saw us from outside, like in a picture: we are not people, we are a road sign warning: “Stop and thank luck because such fate didn’t befall you as befell us, and only then keep going your way”.
Igor Eliseev
I think everything’s beautiful that is done through human’s heart and soul, that makes one’s inner world visible, that gives a chance to look at oneself from outside – everything is beautiful, even us.
Igor Eliseev
We always humble ourselves before bastards - it has already become a tradition.
Igor Eliseev
Sometimes it feels like you and I are at the movie theater, sitting next to each other and watching the same movie. People say something, argue incessantly, even fight, but this is all somewhere far away, on the other side of the screen, and we are just passive onlookers unable to affect the course of events.
Igor Eliseev
At times it is so enjoyable to mire your neighbor into the filth you already got stuck in long ago!
Igor Eliseev
And now, it turns out that our mother’s name means benevolence and generosity to people as objects of love! This is both a unique and beautiful name, Charity. “It was one of life’s cruel ironies,” I thought, “that a midwife, or whoever filled in the documents, must have known our mom’s name. I suppose she had a lot of fun naming us Hope and Faith! Or, on the contrary, she sympathized.
Igor Eliseev
It is worthy of note that killing oneself and killing someone is not the same. For the former, one should lose one’s faith, for the latter, one should never have any.
Igor Eliseev
Oh, this tormenting concern that your neighbor’s life might be better than yours! And how great it feels when you realize that the truth is exactly the opposite; and we’re not so different after all. Nоthing brings true neighbors together like a little friendly competition.
Igor Eliseev
All our life we had been dreaming to get through every little hole into this beautiful and unfamiliar world where parents and children love each other not for something but in spite of everything, to plunge into this fairy world entirely, settle down and live there. So why didn’t I feel happy when it happened for real?
Igor Eliseev
I should be grateful to the knife that’s curing me for being so sharp.
Igor Eliseev
People have no limits either in love or in hatred. But is it their fault? They despise us because they are afraid, for we remind them that getting crippled or sick might happen to anyone; or, perhaps, the true reason of their hatred lies much deeper inside, stemming from the hidden ugliness of their own souls?
Igor Eliseev
Probably, sooner or later every person founds oneself to be needless.
Igor Eliseev
How perfectly evil spirit and beauty can combine in one person, harmonically supplementing each other.
Igor Eliseev
Would he as well neglect the perishing person, wouldn’t he help to get up, would he turn away? I think I know the answer is obvious. He was flying so high above each of us that after falling down he got below everybody else. To be precise, he was simply knocked down. And we, none of us, just did nothing. Thus, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, the best of us were eliminated in order to let others decay.
Igor Eliseev
What if initially they had named you Faith and me Hope, but afterwards they forgot who of us had which name and swapped them around by mistake? You always believe that everything is going to be all right, and your faith helps me.”“And you hope that it will be that way. We have this close bond between us,” and, after thinking a while, you added, “All people need hope, no one can live without it; and our hope is way stronger when it is warmed up by faith. So it isn’t really important who is Faith and who is Hope; the main thing is that we are connected together.
Igor Eliseev
What is the point of living if we are going to die anyway? What difference does it make if it’s going to happen now or later? All we have to do is to take a step and jump off; that will resolve all problems, answer all questions at a time. And what if we are already flying down? We have jumped off, – perhaps, right after the birth, – not even knowing about it! The ground is already near; we just have the last moment to live and finally realize we are already dead for a long time.
Igor Eliseev
You have always understood and accepted my most genuine, most intimate impulses and responded to them with surprising accuracy. I wish all people turned into such mirrors for each other.
Igor Eliseev
Hope, what if initially they had named you Faith and me Hope, but afterwards they forgot who of us had which name and swapped them around by mistake? You always believe that everything is going to be all right, and your faith helps me.”“And you hope that it will be that way. We have this close bond between us,” and, after thinking a while, you added, “All people need hope, no one can live without it; and our hope is way stronger when it is warmed up by faith. So it isn’t really important who is Faith and who is Hope; the main thing is that we are connected together.
Igor Eliseev
They always act this way: push those who are falling.
Igor Eliseev
Hope, tell me how could it be possible that grief and happiness are scattered all over the world so unevenly? Why do some people get all the troubles and misfortunes while the others are intoxicated with the abundance of material belongings, fat bellies and money? Why is there such injustice? Or, maybe, we are mistaken it’s unfair!?
Igor Eliseev
Is it so hard to offer your help and sympathy to somebody in grief? It takes a little to make one step, but, in an inexplicable manner, it stretches into thousands of kilometers. All of us are full of empathy and consolation but always prefer to express it from a distance.
Igor Eliseev
People! Please. Listen. Our life, our bodies are the most authentic clinical record ever! Why do you have to ask for any other one, alien, fake, distorted by illegible handwriting belonging to someone who has never been us and has never tried to understand us? Do you think that is right?
Igor Eliseev
Maybe the consequences of someone’s unreason can be remedied only with a new unreason?
Igor Eliseev
It always turns out this way: at first people idolize you, swear to be your faithful friend forever and then spit in your tea and in your soul, too.
Igor Eliseev
It is hard to take the last step, but the hardest thing is to make a choice between the unwillingness to live and the inability to die.
Igor Eliseev
He who has lived and thought can neverHelp in his soul despising men,He who has felt will be foreverHaunted by days he can’t regain.For him there are no more enchantments,Him does the serpent of remembrance,Him does repentance always gnaw.All this will frequently affordA great delight to conversations.
Alexander Pushkin
If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today.
Mikhail Gorbachev
We don't know how to say goodbye,We wander on, shoulder to shoulderAlready the sun is going downYou're moody, and I am your shadow.Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the deadWhy are we so different from the rest?Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.That stick in your hand is tracingMansions in the snow in which we will always be together.
Anna Akhmatova
And was it his destined part / Only one moment in his life / To be close to your heart?
Ivan Turgenev
Rare and powerful harmonies exist,Shaping both scent and contour in a flower.Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until,Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond.And thus do images of fleeting vision,Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky,Once turned to stone live on from age to age,Held always in a faultless, polished phrase.("A Sonnet To Form")
Valery Bryusov