Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 40

Then this God does exist according to you?""He does not exist, but He is. In the stone there is no pain, but in the fear of the stone is the pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. He who will conquer pain and terror will become himself a god.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage; but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything: everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal...
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Above all, avoid lying, especially lying to yourself. Keep watching out for your lies, watch for them every hour, every minute. Also avoid disgust, both for others and yourself: whatever strikes you as disgusting within yourself is cleansed by the mere fact that you notice it.Avoid fear, too, although fear is really only a consequence of lies. Never be afraid of your petty selfishness when you try to achieve love and don’t be too alarmed if you act badly on occasion.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Lupe would have a lot to say about this. I can almost hear her gravelly voice in my head. There is no hate without fear, she'd say. Hate is fear crystallized, fear objectified. We hate what threatens our selves, our dreams, our plans, our freedom, our place in the world, our place in the hearts of the people we love. We fear first. Then we hate.And I know what I would say to her in response. Lupe, I'd say. My troubles are just beginning.
Paullina Simons
They think the government shows people everything —how to work, study, eat, sleep and that’s it. They are afraid of change. They do not understand that if you want to do something, you should do it. You are free, people, free!
Anton Krotov
...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
Vladimir Nabokov
Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Fear is never a good counselor and victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.
Leo Tolstoy
People pull on a smile as if it were just another accessory. It might as well be a tie than a smile.
Vadim Zeland
When the mind wants to hope it refuses to listen.
Vadim Zeland
He was, however, unable to give much prolonged or continuous thought to anything that evening , or to concentrate on any one idea; and anyway, even if he had been able to, he would not have found his way to a solution of these questions in a conscious manner; now he could only feel. In place of dialectics life had arrived, and in his consciousness something of a wholly different nature must now work towards fruition.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.
Alexander Schmemann
Those [things] that we encounter for the first time immediately have a spiritual effect upon us. A child, for whom every object is new, experiences the world in this way: it sees light, is attracted by it, wants to grasp it, burns its finger in the process, and thus learns fear and respect for the flame.
Wassily Kandinsky
And once more given to inaction,Empty in spirit and alone,He settled down – to the distractionOf making other minds his own;Collecting books, he stacked a shelfful,Read, read, not even one was helpful:Here, there was dullness, there pretence;This one lacked conscience, that one sense;All were by different shackles fettered;And, past times having lost their hold,The new still raved about the old.Like women, books he now deserted,And mourning taffeta he drewAcross the bookshelf’s dusty crew.
Alexander Pushkin
We've all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all lame, each of us more or less. We've even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real "living life," and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we've reached a point where we regard real "living life" almost as a labor, almost as a service, and we all agree in ourselves that it's better from a book.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Let the readers do some of the work themselves
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.
Anton Chekhov
But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
Vladimir Nabokov
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
. . . finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince. . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
Gary Shteyngart
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Boris Pasternak
Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.
Anton Chekhov
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.
Vladimir Nabokov
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Vladimir Nabokov
A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.
Andrei Tarkovsky
There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
Marina Tsvetaeva
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life.
Anton Chekhov
It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.
Dmitri Mendeleev
Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.
Leo Tolstoy
If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine!
George Gamow
For, having begun to build their Tower of Babel without us, they will end in anthropophagy. And it is then that the beast will come crawling to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood from its eyes. And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on it will be written: "Mystery!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.
Vladimir L. Voeikov
It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!
George Gamow
It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them.
Leo Tolstoy
No, it is not a commonplace, sir! If up to now, for example, I have been told to 'love my neighbor,' and I did love him, what came of it?. . . What came of it was that I tore my caftan in two, shared it with my neighbor, and we were both left half naked, in accordance with the Russian proverb which says: If you chase several hares at once, you won't overtake any one of them. But science says: Love yourself before all, because everything in the world is based on self-interest. If you love only yourself, you will set your affairs up properly, and your caftan will also remain in one piece. And economic truth adds that the more properly arranged personal affairs and, so to speak, whole caftans there are in society, the firmer its foundations are and the better arranged its common cause. It follows that by acquiring for everyone, as it were, and working so that my neighbor will have something more than a torn caftan, not from private, isolated generosities now, but as a result of universal prosperity.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.
Leo Tolstoy
When she looked at him with those dark eyes, Nassar felt the urge to say something intelligent and deeply impressive. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind came to mind.
Ilona Andrews
Her philosophy was, if it had a pulse, it could be killed. I didn’t really have a philosophy, but I could see how talking with the school director would be difficult for her. If he said something she didn’t like, chopping him to tiny pieces wouldn’t exactly help me get into the school.
Ilona Andrews
I want gifts and Christmas music. I don’t care how many Draziri are out there. They won’t take Christmas from me.”“Yes, but we don’t have a suitable male,” Orro said. “And only one dog.”I looked at him.“What is this Christmas?” Wing asked.Orro turned from the stove. “It’s the rite of passage during which the young males of the human species learn to display aggression and use weapons.”Sean stopped what he was doing and looked at Orro.“The young men go out in small packs,” Orro continued. “They brave the cold and come into conflict with other packs and they have to prove their dominance through physical combat. Their fathers teach them lessons in the proper use of swear words, and the young men have to undergo tests of endurance, like holding soap in their mouths and licking cold metal objects.”Sean made a strangled noise.“At the end of their trials, they go to see a wise elder in a red suit to prove their worth. If they are judged worthy, the family erects a ceremonial tree and presents them with gifts of weapons.”Sean was clearly struggling, because his head was shaking.“Also,” Orro added, “a sacrificial poultry is prepared and then given to the wild animals, probably to appease the nature spirits.”Sean roared with laughter.
Ilona Andrews
I squinted at her. “You’re an adult.” “You’re an adult too.” “But you’re an older adult. You’ve had more practice.” Mom leaned back and laughed.
Ilona Andrews
A drunken but exceedingly depressed German clown from Munich entertained the public.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
How can it not exist? What does that—” A tiny grey body shot in front of the Land Rover. “Squirrel!”Mad Rogan swerved to the side, trying to avoid the suicidal beast. The SUV hit a curb and jumped. For a terrifying second, we almost flew, weightless. My heart leaped into my throat. The heavy vehicle landed back on the pavement with a thud. The squirrel leapt into the grass on the other side.I remembered to breathe. “Thank you for not killing the squirrel.”“You’re welcome, although now I want to go back and strangle it.
Ilona Andrews
He chuckled into my hair. My body decided this would be a fine moment to remember that his body was wrapped around mine and his body was muscular, hard, and hot, and my butt was pressed against his groin. Cuddled up by a dragon. No, thank you. Let me off this train.“If you keep wiggling, things might get uncomfortable,” he said into my ear, his voice like a caress. “I’m doing my best, but thinking about baseball only takes you so far.
Ilona Andrews
Shit" Bug said, his face sour. "It's that thing again. We've been dealing with it since Pierce. You think you have a lead and then poof" - he made a puffing motion with his fingers - "it melts into nothing and all you have is frustration and the far noise your face makes when you hit you desk with it."Fart.... what?
Ilona Andrews
The only way to make sure that the Hand didn't get to you would have been to kill your brother. I could've done it, but I didn't. I just gave him some drugs.""You gave an addict in rehab drugs, and you want credit for it?""Of course it sounds bad when you put it that way.
Ilona Andrews
Audrey turned to him, a sly little spark hiding in her eyes. "THe only man who gets to call me'love' would be waking up next to me after a very, very fun n
Ilona Andrews
And I meant to tell you: that was a one-in-a-thousand shot."She raised her hand. "Don't.""It was awesome," George confirmed. "It really was," Jack said. "His head exploded.
Ilona Andrews
Breaking into the house in the middle of the night just wasn't his style. He did his best work in plain view, and, usually, his tongue was doing most
Ilona Andrews
A forest," William said, his expression distant. "Where the ground is dry soil and stone. Where tall trees grow and centuries of autumn carpet their roots. Where the wind smells of game and wildflowers.""Why, that was lovely, Lord Bill. Do you ever write poetry? Something for your blueblood lady?""No.""She doesn't like poetry?""Leave it."Hehe. "Oh, so you have a lady. How interes--
Ilona Andrews
She put her hand on her hip. "Where are you going?""To the boat. You called me Lord Bill again. That means we're cool."Cerise slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand and followed him.
Ilona Andrews
An evil spark flared in his eyes. "Trade: raccoon for some answers.
Ilona Andrews
His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.
Vladimir Nabokov
This doesn't mean you're getting a discount."Audrey heaved a mock sigh. "Oh well. I guess I'll have to ply you with sexual favors, then."Gnome choked on the soup. "I'm old enough to be your grandfather!"Audrey winked at him, gathering the empty bags. "But you're not.
Ilona Andrews