Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 28

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
Vladimir Nabokov
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
Vladimir Nabokov
Myths tend to spiral out of control. Do you howl at the full moon and steal maidens to devour?""Depends on the maiden," he said.Was he flirting with me? Devouring didn't really go with flirting, but his tone of voice did. Was this how werewolves flirted? Hey, baby, if I had to kill any girl and eat her flesh, it would be you...clean sweep
Ilona Andrews
You will show that thing to me and from now on, I will deal with them."I opened my eyes really wide and fluttered my eyelashes at him. "I'm sorry, I must've missed your coronation ceremony. Silly me.
Ilona Andrews
Amy," Elsie Moore said in her crackling voice, her gaze fixed on Declan. "I want you to get me a new bear. A blond one.
Ilona Andrews
Alexei was a dream of something more... He was a reminder that I could be so much more...
Lada Ray
and what shall I have to dream of when I have been so happy in reality beside you!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But then, we have science, and with its help we shall discover Truth once more; then we shall accept it in full knowledge. Knowledge is of a higher order than feeling; awareness of life is of a higher order than life. Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal to us the laws of nature, and knowledge of the laws of nature will confer upon us a happiness beyond happiness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Note for a moment do I take you for a truth that is real,' Ivan exclaimed in what even amounted to fury. 'You are a falsehood, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only I do not know how to destroy you, and perceive that for a certain time I must suffer you. You are a hallucination I am having. You are the embodiment of myself, but only of one side of me ... of my thoughts and emotions, though only those that are most loathsome and stupid. In that regard you might even be of interest to me, if only I had time to throw away on you ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Beside himself with shame and despair, the utterly ruined though perfectly just Mr. Golyadkin dashed headlong away, wherever fate might lead him; but with every step he took, with every thud of his foot on the granite of the pavement, there leapt up as though out of the earth a Mr. Golyadkin precisely the same, perfectly alike, and of a revolting depravity of heart. And all these precisely similar Golyadkins set to running after one another as soon as they appeared, and stretched in a long chain like a file of geese, hobbling after the real Mr. Golyadkin, so there was nowhere to escape from these duplicates — so that Mr. Golyadkin, who was in every way deserving of compassion, was breathless with terror; so that at last a terrible multitude of duplicates had sprung into being; so that the whole town was obstructed at last by duplicate Golyadkins, and the police officer, seeing such a breach of decorum, was obliged to seize all these duplicates by the collar and to put them into the watch-house, which happened to be beside him . . . Numb and chill with horror, our hero woke up, and numb and chill with horror felt that his waking state was hardly more cheerful . . . It was oppressive and harrowing . . . He was overcome by such anguish that it seemed as though some one were gnawing at his heart.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This life you cry up so much is what I wanted to extinguish by suicide, whereas my dream, my dream—oh, it has revealed to me a great, new, regenerated intensity of life!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
How can you tell a man there’s nothing to do? I can’t imagine a situation in which there could ever be nothing to do! Do it for mankind and don’t worry about the rest. There’s so much to do that a lifetime won’t be enough, if you look around attentively.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Men always did and always will err and nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
Leo Tolstoy
Let's make our existence more joyous, fulfilled and full of positive adventures... Let's add more vivid colors to life in the world around us: making it happier, merrier, easier, healthier, tastier and brighter! Our project is a constant source of inspiration to support these ideas.
Sahara Sanders
No man lives, can live, without having some object in view, and making efforts to attain that object. But when object there is none, and hope is entirely fled, anguish often turns a man into a monster.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
All we cared about was dividends. Well, we can't do business that way today. We have learned that what's best for the countries we operate in is best for the company. Maybe we can't make the people love us, but we will make ourselves so useful to them that they will want us to stay.
Sam Zemurray
Some PR is about getting information about a great product or thingy out to the people who would enjoy it, while other PR is about creating a web of lies that conceals the fact that your company harnesses the energy produced by rape and uses it to make a chemical that kills forests for fun. Either way, you're going to need it.
Eugene Mirman
Men never understand what honor is, though they're always talking about it
Leo Tolstoy
Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.
Andreï Makine
Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.
Leo Tolstoy
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
Leo Tolstoy
Men and swords. My father said that if you put any able-bodied man, no matter how peaceful, into a room with a sword and a practice dummy and leave him alone, eventually the man would pick up the sword and try to stab the dummy. It is human nature.
Ilona Andrews
I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.
Leo Tolstoy
With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.
Leo Tolstoy
Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment.
Mikhail Bulgakov
One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh.
Leo Tolstoy
[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
Vladimir Nabokov
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
Catherine the Great
People are made in such a way that if something inexplicable happens to them, they write it off to an overheated imagination.
Max Frei
Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
Vladimir Nabokov
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbor and not to 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 couldn't be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
Leo Tolstoy
Everything which is of use to mankind is honourable.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Have you ever asked yourself, where do Evil come from? No? But many ask the question, and I’ll tell you where there is Evil. Not in Darkness, as many believe, but in Garbling. Garbling turns Light into Darkness, and Darkness into Light. Either is precipitated by it into its non-existent universe. Garbling merges Chaos and Harmony -- not as their harmony -- but its own, garbled. Garbling rules here below.
Lara Biyuts
Make the difficult habitual, the habitual easy, and the easy beautiful.
Constantin S. Stanislavski
Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him.
Leo Tolstoy
All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most… .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.
Leo Tolstoy
If you don’t do anything to capture and draw your memories—no matter whether you choose words, pencil, photography, or filming—the only place where they have a chance to exist is in your head, which can’t be called the most reliable place to store them; soon, they’d be lost forever… leaving no trace, like they never existed… like YOU never existed… same as those billions and billions of lives that had already disappeared from the world.
Sahara Sanders
Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand
Leo Tolstoy
But there is nothing enduring in the world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface.
Nikolai Gogol
You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
All's taken away: my love and my power.The body, thrown into city it hates,Finds no joy in the sunlight. With every hourThe blood grows colder in my veins.
Anna Akhmatova
A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death..
Anton Chekhov
I’m not weeping, I’m not complaining,Happiness is not for me.
Anna Akhmatova
Lebedev: A time has come of sorrow and sadness for you. Man, my dear friend, is like a samovar. It doesn't always stand on a shelf in the chill but sometimes they put hot coals in it and it goes psh... psh! This comparison is worthless but you won't think up a cleverer one.
Anton Chekhov
I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Tomorrow you may look up and see me as a lawyer, a doctor, business executive,teacher - or WHATEVER I BELIEVE I CAN BE !My story isn't about nice handles or quickness on the court ,but about HARD WORK, PERSEVERANCE, and FAITH! I know God's blessings ,I can accomplish anything and i mean ANYTHING!!!
Jon-Robert Holden
The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
Leo Tolstoy
The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.
Vasily Grossman
A long while yet will you keep that great mother's grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face.
Maxim Gorky
Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn't count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he'd see that there's enough of both lots for him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It seemed as if the valley were not always girded by woods, growing on the surrounding hills and facing away from the horizon, but the trees had only taken up their places now, rising out of the ground to offer their condolences. He almost waved away the tangible beauty of the hour like a crowd of persistent friends, almost said to the lingering afterglow, 'thank you, thank you, I'll be all right.'
Boris Pasternak
Thus heaven's gift to us is this: That habit takes the place of bliss.
Alexander Pushkin
Our relationship had been doomed form the start, because it was based on grief, and unlike love, grief eventually passed.
Ilona Andrews
It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life -- and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity. I stretched out my arms to them in my despair, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I had done all this, I alone, that I had brought them corruption, contagion, and lies!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky