Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 31

Climbing your personal Everest, do your best to make sure it won’t end up being your Calvary.
Sahara Sanders
There are oceans of things to discover, to explore, to learn, to invent, to create in this world; especially with its modern possibilities offered. So, I don't understand when people complain they’re bored and have nothing to do.
Sahara Sanders
With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.
Wassily Kandinsky
Art for Art’s Sake is for the well fed. The well fed are all the babies in cradles and my kitty along with them, and I am happy if my writings are for my kitty.
Lara Biyuts
I create, therefore I am.
Lada Ray
Spiritual growth and creativity are two sides of the same coin.
Lada Ray
As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn.
Gary Shteyngart
Many believe creativity is mystery, and I always knew that my body is the key.
Lara Biyuts
The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it ...Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help.
Boris Pasternak
You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.
Leo Tolstoy
I'm not saying that French books are talented, and intelligent, and noble. They don't satisfy me either. But they're less boring than the Russian ones, and not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work––a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don't have. I can't remember a single new book in which the author doesn't do his best, from the very first page, to entangle himself in all possible conventions and private deals with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological analysis, a third must have "a warm attitude towards humanity," a fourth purposely wallows for whole pages in descriptions of nature, lest he be suspected of tendentiousness... One insists on being a bourgeois in his work, another an aristocrat, etc. Contrivance, caution, keeping one's own counsel, but no freedom nor courage to write as one wishes, and therefore no creativity.- A Boring Story
Anton Chekhov
Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.
Lev S. Vygotsky
The process of creation can be unpredictable and, in some way, similar to love: the brightest waves of inspiration may sometimes occur in wrong timing, wrong places, or even with wrong people.
Sahara Sanders
The hardest situation is when the individuals desperate “to cut off your wings” are your closest family members whom you can’t escape dealing with.
Sahara Sanders
A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.
Issac Asimov
Before the war Sofya Levinton had once said to Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, 'If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another – I might be in Pamir picking alpine roses and clicking my camera, while this other man, my death, might be eight thousand miles away, fishing for ruff in a little stream after school. I might be getting ready to go to a concert and he might be at the railway station buying a ticket to go and visit his mother-in-law – and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can't avoid it...
Vasily Grossman
Do you know what it's like to be condemned to love?
Sergei Lukyanenko
Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it.
Leo Tolstoy
a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way — even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.
Vladimir Nabokov
Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it.
Mikhail Bulgakov
My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you...
Alexander Pushkin
If the first job one has in a given profession acts as a tuning fork for the career that follows, Frederick Thomas was attuned from the start to a pitch of the highest quality.
Vladimir Alexandrov
If you want to work on your acting, work on yourself.
Anton Chekhov
The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.
Leo Tolstoy
I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again.
Anna Akhmatova
Then she would wander through fields, over simple, poor land, looking carefully and keenly all round her, still getting used to being alive in the world, and feeling glad that everything in it was right for her — for her body, her heart, and her freedom.
Andrei Platonov
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. 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 if it goes wrong, it lives.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You don't always get stronger on the days that everything comes easily to you.
Nastia Liukin
Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.
Leo Tolstoy
God gave the day, God gave the strength.
Leo Tolstoy
Strength, strength is what I need; nothing can be done without strength; and strength must be gained by strength.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Some say God is living there [in space]. I was looking around very attentively, but I did not see anyone there. I did not detect either angels or gods....I don't believe in God. I believe in man - his strength, his possibilities, his reason.
Gherman Titov
Though these young men unhappily fail tounderstand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest ofall sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years oftheir seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiplytenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have setbefore them as their goal--such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strengthof many of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Q. Surely it is easier to be objective about other people than about oneself?A. No, it is more difficult. If you become objective to yourself you can see other people objectively, but not before, because before that it will all be coloured by your own views, attitudes, tastes, by what you like and what you dislike. To be objective you must be free from it all. You can become objective to yourself in the state of self-consciousness: this is the first experience of coming into contact with the real object.
P.D. Ouspensky
Q. But it seems to me there are circumstances that simply induce one to have negative emo
P.D. Ouspensky
Many things are mechanical and should remain mechanical. But mechanical thoughts, mechanical feelings—that is what has to be studied and can and should be changed. Mechanical thinking is not worth a penny. You can think about many things mechanically, but you will get nothing from it.
P.D. Ouspensky
Everything 'happens'. People can 'do' nothing. From the time we are born to the time we die things happen, happen, happen, and we think we are doing. This is our normal state in life, and even the smallest possibility to do something comes only through the work, and first only in oneself, not externally.
P.D. Ouspensky
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
Vladimir Nabokov
Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.
P.D. Ouspensky
Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of “individuality” lost.
Leon Trotsky
Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.
Leon Trotsky
No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
Anton Chekhov
Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.
P.D. Ouspensky
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses every
Anton Chekhov
Never for one minute have I taken you for reality . . . You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But profound as psychology is, it's a knife that cuts both ways (...). I have purposely resorted to this method, gentlemen of the jury, to show that you can prove anything by it. It all depends on who makes use of it. Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously. I am speaking of the abuse of psychology, gentlemen.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.
Lev S. Vygotsky
Through others we become ourselves.
Lev S. Vygotsky
I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man is a vile creature!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved…
Anton Chekhov
You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Don't be surprised that I value prejudice, observe certain conventions, seek power--it's because I know I live in an empty society.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.
Arkady Strugatsky
Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.
Eli Khamarov
It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?
Boris Pasternak
Imagine a problem in psychology: to find a way of getting people in our day and age - Christians, humanitarians, nice, kind people - to commit the most heinous crimes without feeling any guilt. There is only one solution - doing just what we do now: you make them governors, superintendents, officers or policemen, a process which, first of all, presupposes acceptance of something that goes by the name of government service and allows people to be treated like inanimate objects, precluding any humane or brotherly relationships, and, secondly, ensures that people working for this government service must be so interdependent that responsibility for any consequences of the way they treat people never devolves on any one of them individually.
Leo Tolstoy