Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 18

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
Vladimir Lenin
The thoughts of a prisoner—they're not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.
Vladimir Nabokov
Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries.
Anton Chekhov
After all, inside every woman, no matter how grown up she is, there is still a frightened little girl.
Sergei Lukyanenko
Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And yet I shall try again: "they are murdering me!"--all right, all together once more: "they are murdering me!" and again: "murdering"... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.
Vladimir Nabokov
We can get you a throne with snakes. I’ll stand next to you and roar at anybody who fails to grovel. Fear Kate Daniels. She is a mighty and terrible ruler. Grendel can anoint the petitioners with his vomit. It’ll be great . . .
Ilona Andrews
I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards cats and dogs.
Vasily Grossman
Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
Vladimir Nabokov
This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!
Leo Tolstoy
Marx himself wrote that capitalism produces above all its own gravediggers. Do you think that perhaps he wasn't talking about capitalism?
Paullina Simons
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
After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey's request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had never dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy, and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? For his hopes for the future? Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing.
Leo Tolstoy
No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
Anton Chekhov
Our vanity is the constant enemy of our dignity.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria's library was said to contain all the human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground.
Ilona Andrews
Only those who never stand up, never fall down.
Fedor Emelianenko
Man has no individual i. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "i"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "i". And each time his i is different. just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.
G.I. Gurdjieff
And, beginning to grind his teeth again, Pyotr Petrovich admitted that he'd been a fool--but only to himself, of course.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He had never clearly fathomed the true weight of a word of good, truth, and purity cast in the stream of human speech and the deep bend it cut in it. Nor had he thought that a word spoken boldly and loudly, with no hint of false shame, but rather with courage, that this word would not drown in the ugly cries of fashionable satyrs but would plunge like a pearl into the abyss of public life and always find itself a shell.Many stumble over a good word, blushing in embarrassment, and utter a careless word boldly and loudly, never suspecting that it, too, unfortunately, will not go for naught but will leave a long trail of often times ineradicable evil.p. 296
Ivan Goncharov
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
It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes it moves irresistibly.
Vladimir Lenin
I wasn't even that lovable to begin with. I was a selfish ass, but somehow something I did made this man love me, deeply and without reservations. He knew things about me that I would die to keep secret. I trusted him more than I trusted anyone in my life. I mattered to him. He was suffering and I wanted it to stop. I wanted to see him happy. I loved him so much.
Ilona Andrews
On the second and the third night there was again a ball -- this time in mid-ocean, during a furious storm sweeping over the ocean, which roared like a funeral mass and rolled up mountainous seas fringed with mourning silvery foam. The Devil, who from the rocks of Gibraltar, the stony gateway of two worlds, watched the ship vanish into night and storm, could hardly distinguish from behind the snow the innumerable fiery eyes of the ship. The Devil was as huge as a cliff, but the ship was even bigger, a many-storied, many-stacked giant, created by the arrogance of the New Man with his ancient heart.
Ivan Bunin
To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.
Leo Tolstoy
I am one of those people who can't help getting a kick out of life-even when it's a kick in the teeth.
Polly Adler
He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength.
Leo Tolstoy
No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze...
Vladimir Nabokov
My mom says . . . there are bad people who hurt others for fun . . . and there are good people who do it by accident. Like, they make a mistake? I think you're a good person.
Svetlana Chmakova
Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.
Anton Chekhov
Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Then he had looked on his spirit as his I; now, it was his healthy strong animal I that he looked upon as himself. And all this terrible change has come about because he had ceased to believe himself and had taken to believing others. This he had done because it was too difficult to live believing one's self: believing one's self, one had to decide every question, not in favour of one's animal I, which was always seeking for easy gratification, but in almost every case against it. Believing others, there was nothing to decide; everything had been decided already, and always in favor of the animal I and against the spiritual. Nor was this all. Believing in his own self, he was always exposing himself to the censure of those around him; believing others, he had their approval.
Leo Tolstoy
Clever father clever daughter clever mother clever son.
Russian proverb
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
No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.
Boris Pasternak
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
Vladimir Nabokov
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
Have you seena dog lick the hand that thrashed it?!
Vladimir Mayakovsky
My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side –a little happier, anyway– and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.
Vladimir Nabokov
... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.
Vladimir Nabokov
I was so happy to be out of there. “Barabas, if you weren’t battingfor the other team, I’d marry you.”He grinned. “If I weren’t batting for the other team, I would accept yourproposal. You had me at ‘No comment.’ If all my clients were this smart, mylife would be much easier. Much, much easier.
Ilona Andrews
The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.
Vladimir Lenin
He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.
Leo Tolstoy
There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.
Victor Pelevin
Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life?
Leo Tolstoy
As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to the courage needed to forge a soul that does not pale, no matter what life brings, regards life not as a heavy burden, a cross, but merely as a duty, and does battle with it with dignity.He had devoted much mental care to his heart and its wise laws. Observing the reflection of beauty on the imagination, both consciously and unconsciously, then the transition from impression to emotion, its symptoms, play, and outcome and looking around himself, advancing into life, he derived for himself the conviction that love moves the world like Archimede's lever, that it holds as much universal and irrefutable truth and good as misunderstanding and misuse do hypocrisy and ugliness.p. 494
Ivan Goncharov
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
So age after age — will it be soon, O Lord? —Beneath the scalpel of nature and art,Our spirit screams, our flesh depletes itself,Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense.("The Sixth Sense")
Nikolay S. Gumilev
Forget everything that surrounds you. Think that there’s just you and me in this wide world.
Olga Goa
Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.
Leo Tolstoy
In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?
Gary Shteyngart
Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.
Alexander Pushkin
The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams.
Vladimir Nabokov