Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 33

Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Does it matter whether it was a dream or a reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.
Anton Chekhov
For me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device. In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us . . . In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.
Andrei Linde
In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately the author of this fragment will again be Ed—but even this is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what?He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: "Trapped? Masturbate!
Victor Pelevin
Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.
Isaac Babel
Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects— that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me— I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.
Vladimir Nabokov
The moments of nature's universal, triumphant silence had come, those minutes when the creative mind works harder, poetic thoughts seethe more ardently, the heart's passion blazes more brightly and its longing aches more painfully, the grain of criminal thought ripens in a cruel soul more imperturbably and powerfully.
Ivan Goncharov
You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:
Olga Goa
You've got something that I don't have. Innocence. Ur eyes express it, & I can read everything in them". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
I cannot perceive that you're still a girl. Ur kisses don't seem so innocent. They just drive me crazy!" #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school.She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
...what will happen to us this night will resemble a flame consuming the icy desert, a shower of stars reflected in a piece of a mirror that in the darkness suddenly fell out of its frame to warn its owner about the proximity of death. It'll resemble the shepherd's pipe and the music that has not been written yet.
Sasha Sokolov
To have no desire is such a load of bullshit--forgive me for being so blunt. To have no passion in one's life is a cop-out for cowards.
Irina Kovalyova
The passion for destruction is also a creative passion
Mikhail Bakunin
They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than theythemselves did.
Boris Pasternak
They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.
Boris Pasternak
Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.
Nikolai Gogol
Only a small crack ... but cracks make caves collapse.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business. We must certainly accept, and we will.
Leo Tolstoy
Just imagine the existence of a man - let us call him A - who has left youth far behind, and of a woman whom we may call B, who is young and happy and has seen nothing as yet of life or of the world. Family circumstances of various kinds brought them together, and he grew to love her as a daughter, and had no fear that his love would change its nature. But he forgot that B was so young, that life was still a May-game to her and that it was easy to fall in love with her in a different way, and that this would amuse her. He made a mistake and was suddenly aware of another feeling, as heavy as remorse, making its way into his heart, and he was afraid. He was afraid that their old friendly relations would be destroyed, and he made up his mind to go away before that happened.
Leo Tolstoy
It was more difficult not tounderstand than to understand.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A quote has an even more powerful effect if we presume not just a particular author behind it, but God, nature, the unconscious, labor, or difference. These are strong fetishes, each conjuring the powerful submedial in a particular way. Yet all of them must nonetheless be exchanged in a certain rhythm according to the laws of the medial economy. In order to create such fetishes, one does not have to use brilliant quotes by famous authors but can use anonymous quotes that stem from the author- less realm of the everyday, lowly, foreign, vulgar, aggressive, or stupid. Precisely such quotes produce the effect of medial sincerity, that is, the revelation of a deeply submerged, hidden, medial plane on the familiar medial surface. It then appears as if this surface had been blasted open from the inside and that the respective quotes had sprung forth from the submedial interior—like aliens. All of this, of course, refers to the economy of the quote as a gift that can be offered, accepted, and reciprocated.
Boris Groys
An author who integrates alien signs into the medial surface of his own texts—signs behind which we presume the existence of other powerful, submedial subjects “as authors”—does not increase the comprehensibility of that text. Yet nonetheless, he increases the magical effectiveness this text exudes. Such quotations lead us to presume that the text houses a dangerous, manipulative subject, a magician with enough power to manipulate the signs of other powerful magicians and able to use them strategically for his own purposes. Thus an author who quotes alien signs conveys a stronger impression of powerful authorship than one who ad- vocates precisely his so-called own ideas—which do not interest anybody precisely because they are only his own. It is also well known that one may not quote the same author too often, in which case quoting gradu- ally looses its magical power and begins to irritate the reader. The reason for this gradual decrease of a quote’s magical effectiveness is that it looses its strangeness over time and gets integrated into the medial surface of a text, thereby becoming a proper part of it. In order to maintain their magical effect, quotes have to be exchanged constantly so as to continue to maintain the same appearance of foreignness and freshness. The quote functions as a magical fetish that lends the entire text a hidden, submedial power beyond its superficial meaning.
Boris Groys
I was wrong when I said that I did not regret the past. I do regret it; I weep for the past love which can never return. Who is to blame, I do not know. Love remains, but not the old love; its place remains, but it is all wasted away and has lost all strength and substance; recollections are still left, and gratitude; but...
Leo Tolstoy
Sober Minds give the world a chance. True Love brings you Hope. Blind Faith moves mountains. And the main savior from despair is Laughter.
Lara Biyuts
…but he realized he would never reconcile himself to life as something other than a prelude. What’s life’s meaning then? What is it? What does make the world go round, not letting hope die? What do people dream about, watching the endless flow of years? They dream. A dream, that’s it. We live for our only dream, which can lead us, hand in hand, through our life; for the dream we reconcile ourselves to any frustrations and we shall struggle for releasing its silky wings from the net of reality. (The right to a mistake.)
Lara Biyuts
I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.
Leo Tolstoy
Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?
Leo Tolstoy
One must be cunning and wicked in this world.
Leo Tolstoy
Another fact that allowed Fascism to gain power over men was their blindness. A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed. The optimism of people standing on the edge of the grave is astounding.
Vasily Grossman
It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.
Masha Gessen
In precisely the same way the specialty of government is not to obey, but to enforce obedience. And a government is only a government so long as it can make itself obeyed, and therefore it always strives for that and will never willingly abandon its power.
Leo Tolstoy
Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.
Leo Tolstoy
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.
Leo Tolstoy
Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
Boris Pasternak
The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.
Leo Tolstoy
Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, and moral being.
Alexander R. Luria
The human mind isn’t a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates.
Garry Kasparov
It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.
Leo Tolstoy
Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.
Anton Chekhov
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
Vladimir Nabokov
Perhaps you'd like, you gentle fellow, To hear what I'm prepared to sayOn "kinfolk" and their implications?Well, here's my view of close relations:They're people whom we're bound to prize, To honor, love, and idolize,And following the old tradition,To visit come the Christmas feast, Or send a wish by mail at least;All other days they've our permission,To quite forget us if they please-So grant them, God, long life and ease!
Alexander Pushkin
Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie.
Russian proverb
She stood in awe of her elder daughter. Lida was never tender, she spoke only about serious things; she lived her own separate life and for her mother and sister was as sacred and slightly mysterious a personage as an admiral who always remains in his cabin is for his sailors.- The House with the Mezzanine
Anton Chekhov
How can I give up stalking when I have a family to feed? Get a job? I don't want to work for you, your work makes me puke, do you understand? This is the way I figure it: if a man works with you, he is always working for one of you, he is a slave and nothing else. And I always wanted to be myself, on my own, so that I could spit at you all, at your boredom and despair.
Arkady Strugatsky
I’m getting off the boat at Coconut Grove. It’s six and you’re not on the dock. I finish up, and start walking home, thinking you’re tied up making dinner, and then I see you and Ant hurrying down the promenade. He is running and you’re running after him. You’re wearing a yellow dress. He jumps on me, and you stop shyly, and I say to you, come on, tadpole, show me what you got, and you laugh and run and jump into my arms. Such a good memory.I love you, babe.
Paullina Simons