Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 35

With thorns in the inner world there will always be roses in the outer world, in law-able compensation.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.
Boris Pasternak
And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
Boris Pasternak
They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn't do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it's not for long!" he added.
Leo Tolstoy
I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you already because of the lies I had told you. Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Only one thing is necessary: we should all have a pure heart, with no anger, hatred, irritation, or hostility in it. If you feel hostility toward another person, think about their inner state. Do not think about yourself, or that you want to prove yourself right. In your quiet, inner thoughts, try to find the good in others. Do not say anything bad about others, even in your own thoughts. When you interact with a person, try to find as much common ground as possible, the more the better, and try to nurture this feeling. To cease being angry with a person and instead to seek peace, forgiveness and love toward him, remind yourself of any sins you may have in common and compare them.
Leo Tolstoy
I was born for the peaceful life,for rural quiet:the lyre's voice in the wild is more resounding,creative dreams are more alive.To harmless leisures consecrated,I wander by a wasteful lakeand far niente is my rule.By every morn I am awakened unto sweet mollitude and freedom;little I read, a lot I sleep,fugitive fame do not pursue.Was it not thus in former years,that I spent in inaction, in the shade,my happiest days?
Alexander Pushkin
With belles no longer did he fall in love,but dangled after them just anyhow;when they refused, he solaced in a twinkle;when they betrayed, was glad to rest.He would seek them without intoxication,while he left them without regret,hardly remembering their love and spite.Exactly thus does an indifferent guestdrive up for evening whist:sits down; then, once the game is over,he drives off from the place,at home falls peacefully asleep,and in the morning does not know himself where he will drive to in the evening.
Alexander Pushkin
Of course, peace treaties are very attractive to those who sign them. They strengthen one's prestige with the electorate. But the time will come when the names of these public figures will be erased from history. Nobody will remember them any longer. But the Western peoples will have to pay heavily for these overtrusting agreements.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
Anton Chekhov
To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.
Anton Chekhov
And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country.
Anton Chekhov
How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And as a sign that everything was now all right in the world, she opened her mouth a fraction, and after arranging her sticky lips better around her old teeth, smacked them and settled down into a state of blissful rest. Levin watched these last movements of hers closely. ‘I’m just the same!’ he said to himself; ‘Just the same! Never mind... All is well.
Leo Tolstoy
Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing,' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.
Leo Tolstoy
Man, as a form, bears within him the eternal principle of being, and by economic movement along his endless path his form is also transformed, just as everything that lives in nature was transformed in him.
Kazimir Malevich
No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageThe painted parchment papering our cage:Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenonThe iridule - when, beautiful and strange,In a bright sky above a mountain rangeOne opal cloudlet in an oval formReflects the rainbow of a thunderstormWhich in a distant valley has been staged -For we are most artistically caged.
Vladimir Nabokov
Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be their nature.- Yes; it's a funny habit.- No, it's not funny; you are wrong there. There's nothing funny in nature, however funny it may seem to man. If dogs could reason and criticize us they'd be sure to find just as much that would be funny to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their masters -far more, I think. I am more convinced that there is far more foolishness among us.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature, especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his companions. The conventional answer to this question is: 'He begot you, and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.' The youth involuntarily reflects: 'But did he love me when he begot me?' he asks, wondering more and more. 'Was it for my sake he begot me? He did not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion, perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity to drunkenness- that's all he's done for me.... Why am I bound to love him simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life after?Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. 'Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window'.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Eh, brother, but nature has to be corrected and guided, otherwise we'd all drown in prejudices. Without that there wouldn't be even a single great man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of human
Anton Chekhov
Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.
Ivan Turgenev
One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees...
Leo Tolstoy
The human worker will go the way of the horse.
Wassily Leontief
We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.
Anton Chekhov
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
Leo Tolstoy
Only super-efforts count.
G.I. Gurdjieff
There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!
Anton Chekhov
The General belonged to the learned type of military men who believed that liberal and humane views can be reconciled with their profession. But being by nature a kind and intelligent man, he soon felt the impossibility of such a reconciliation.
Leo Tolstoy
Considering things in the ecumenical measure, we are the microbes of the Universe.
Sahara Sanders
Be near your brothers. Not just one, but both of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.
Leo Tolstoy
There are such repulsive faces in the world.
Leo Tolstoy
Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.
Leo Tolstoy
It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.
Boris Pasternak
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
Leo Tolstoy
A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.
Leo Tolstoy
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent.
Leo Tolstoy
You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!
Leon Trotksy
All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.
Boris Pasternak
In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.
Leo Tolstoy
History is the hidden map of who, where and how we are today.
Elena Lappin
One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.
Osip Mandelstam
Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?
Leonid Borodin
No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.
Boris Pasternak
In olden days people were worse than us but knew much more than us.
Vladimir Odoyevsky
There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed.
Vasily Grossman
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.
Leo Tolstoy
This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.
Leo Tolstoy
Sometimes - history needs a push.
Vladimir Lenin
What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.
Leo Tolstoy
There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed.
Vasily Grossman
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.
Leo Tolstoy