Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 32

We are shocked by thieves taking pride in their clever touch, prostitutes in their depravity and murderers in their callousness. But it is shocking only because the atmosphere of the circles they move in is restricted, and - what matters most - we are on the outside. But isn't the same thing happening when rich men take pride in their wealth (which is theft), military commanders in their victories (which are murder) and rulers in their power (which is violence)? We do not see them as people who corrupt the concept of life, or good and evil, in order to justify their own situation, but only because the circles of people who share these corrupt concepts are wider, and we belong to them.
Leo Tolstoy
Twenty times better to err on the person than suspicious of everyone.
Arkady Strugatsky
Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render him what is God's — that is a sacrifice we dare not make!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.
Leo Tolstoy
... we live in a society of larvae--immature human beings, adolescents disguised as adults.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Light-minded society mercilessly persecutes in reality what it allows in theory
Alexander Pushkin
Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should share with those whohave not, but he who would act out this principle is speedily informed that these beautiful sentimentsare all very well in poetry, but not in practice. “To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself,” we say, andyet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to thepractice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselveswith sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist.
Pyotr Kropotkin
But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.
Leo Tolstoy
In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper.
Ellie Midwood
I have inflammation of the imagination.
Lera Auerbach
The shadowy edge between normal and paranormal is more than ILLUSORY...
Sahara Sanders
If something unusual is what you really see and really feel, and if that’s what does happen to you in your real life, how is THAT called FICTION? One simple reason... that it’s the only way the society would agree to call it “normal,” based on the current level of development of their mentality.
Sahara Sanders
Happily chatting and counting pocket change, patting each other on the back and whistling foolish songs, we go out on the thousand-legged street and miraculously turn into passersby.
Sasha Sokolov
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.
Paullina Simons
Tatiana: "Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?"Alexander: "That wasn't fighting, Tatiana. That was foreplay.
Paullina Simons
But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Now I understand why women want to have children - it's simply the urge to create happiness for yourself, somehow to fill the oppressive, unbearable emptiness in your soul.
Nina Lugovskaya
Peaceful with six children Darya Alexandrova could not be...Rare indeed were the brief periods of peace...hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of evil propensities in her children--the children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that she as a mother was partial to her children. All the same, she could not help saying to herself that she had charming children, all six of them in different ways, but a set of children such as is not often to be met with, and she was happy in them, and proud of them.
Leo Tolstoy
Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones!The Brothers KaramazovIvan to Alyosha, on the suffering and torture of children, "Book V - Pro and Contra, Chapter 4 - Rebellion.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.
Vasily Grossman
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
Leo Tolstoy
Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I'm saying is that not everybody should have children.
Gary Shteyngart
I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.
Gary Shteyngart
Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers are invariably children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Helen devises plans to become a monster herself.
Ekaterina Sedia
The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.
Ivan Turgenev
My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?
Gary Shteyngart
Children can be told anything—anything. I've always been struck by seeing how little grown-up people understand children, how little parents even understand their own children. Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they are little and that it is too early for them to understand. What a miserable and unfortunate idea! And how readily the children detect that their fathers consider them too little to understand anything, though they understand everything. Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
...those children were already beginning to repay her care by affording her small joys. These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.
Leo Tolstoy
The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there are groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment.
Maxim Gorky
The verbal patterns and the patterns of behavior we present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These aesthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible.
Esphyr Slobodkina
Im's offspring stare at stars and make clocks that calculate useless happenings like the angle of a hawk's claws as it strikes its prey. They demonstrate their contraptions and everyone marvels. My children get drunk, confuse a herd of cows with an enemy regiment, and slaughter the lot, screaming like lunatics until the entire army panics.
Ilona Andrews
That's what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.
Ivan Turgenev
Woe to the man who offends a small child!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If one of the most interesting places to be is your inner world, you will never be bored when you are alone.
Sahara Sanders
Remember that there is onlyone important time and is Now. The present moment isthe only time over which we have dominion. The mostimportant person is always the person with whom youare, who is right before you, for who knows if you willhave dealings with any other person in the future. Themost important pursuit is making that person, the onestanding at you side, happy, for that alone is the pursuitof life.
Leo Tolstoy
Man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.
Gary Shteyngart
Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception which reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
Leo Tolstoy
To love life is to love God.
Leo Tolstoy
...but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes.But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious.
Leo Tolstoy
Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort ,is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.
Leo Tolstoy
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
Leo Tolstoy
Looking through the ruby glass one cannot see the true colour of the sky.
Lara Biyuts
Sex is about physical attraction, yes, but it's also about trust. I don't trust you. You're completely self-absorbed and egoistic. You offer nothing I want.
Ilona Andrews
We have to stop anyway. I don't want you to regret this later. And I don't want your head to explode.""Really? You're so good that my head would explode?"It took him a moment. His expression changed from intense to speculative. "It's a possibility. I'm not a doctor, but Doolittle says it could happen.""That's a lot of expectation to live up to.""I exceed expectations."So modest, too.
Ilona Andrews
The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you're hungry and disgust you when you've had your fill.
M. Ageyev
Prom night can be a special night, if you let it be. I know you think it's for losers and something that popular kids do because they are boring people with porcelain hearts who don't know what it means to be lonely. But you're wrong. Prom is a chance for everyone to try oral sex. Go for it.
Eugene Mirman
A car's not the right place for showing off to a girl—the bed's the place for that. The consequences of a mistake there are more upsetting, but less tragic.
Sergei Lukyanenko
Before going home with a guy, give him a blow job. Guys are always more relaxed after a blow job. (You're totally welcome, guys. P.S. Girls can't see this sentence!!!!!)
Eugene Mirman
The only type of sexual relations possible are those with someone who is as advanced and capable as oneself.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. If they touch at the wrong time, you can make a baby or die.
Eugene Mirman
Catch sunbeams in a mirror! A reflection of a sunbeam can melt an iceberg.
Lara Biyuts
There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.
Nicholas Lobachevsky
Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained—something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know;
Fyodor Dostoyevsky