Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 32

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Photography is a magical kind of art that allows people to preserve time and moments, and to describe the world the way they see it.
Sahara Sanders
Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.
Gary Shteyngart
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka — it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit.Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently.After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow — and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky.Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance...("He Has Descended")
Zinaida Gippius
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
Man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of simple human needs; and that all unhappiness is due, not to privation but to superfluity.
Leo Tolstoy
And another thing about German symphonic development: [it's] just like German philosophy, all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with reasoning. Just keep one thing in mind. The creative act carries within itself its own aesthetic laws. When an artist revises, it means he is dissatisfied. When he revises what is already satisfying, he is Germanizing, chewing over what has [already] been said. We Russians are not cud chewers; we are omnivores!
Modest Mussorgsky
You will find complete, absolute atheism, not a conscious atheism, but rather the animal atheism of an uneducated man, the atheism of a cat or dog. They call themselves believers, and they lie: they neither believe in nor rely upon that God to whom woman, children, idealists, and people in misfortune like to turn.
N.G. Pomyalovsky
It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life -- and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture—which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Have you ever dealt with people who have lost everything in just an hour? In the morning you leave the house where your wife, your children, your parents live. You return and you find a smoking pit. Then something happens to you - to a certain extent you stop being human. You do not need any glory, money anymore; revenge becomes your only joy. And because you no longer cling to life, death avoids you, the bullets fly past. You become a wolf.
Russian General Aleksander Lebed
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Zoya
Strictly speaking, she was out of order. This dear 0-, how shall 1 say it?The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts-at any rate not the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
It is worthy of note that killing oneself and killing someone is not the same. For the former, one should lose one’s faith, for the latter, one should never have any.
Igor Eliseev
Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.
Leo Ornstein
I only wake to fall asleepAnd sleep, to awake without end.
Konstantin Batyushkov
But then there's loneliness. However you might philosophise about it, loneliness is a terrible thing, my dear fellow… Although in reality, of course, it's absolutely of no importance!
Anton Chekhov
At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, argues that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to shut one's eyes to the disagreeable until it actually comes, and to think instead of what is pleasant. When a man is alone he generally listens to the first voice; in the company of his fellow-men, to the second.
Leo Tolstoy
Happiness is pleasure without regret
Leo Tolstoy
And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Pray to God but keep rowing to shore.
Russian proverb
I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.
Vladimir Lenin
If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.
Leo Tolstoy
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
Gary Shteyngart
I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
Vladimir Nabokov
Seeing that I would never manage to fall asleep, I arose, lit a candle, and after dressing went outside.Beneath the dull glow of the winter moon the snow glowed like pale blue china. The sidewalks sparkled weakly beneath the rays of the flickering street lamps; the benumbed streets slumbered forlornly. I walked, passing one corner after the other, and suddenly found myself on the edge of town. Further, beyond the square, an endless expanse began to glisten with a somber silverness.I stopped just before the gates. My intent gaze could distinguish nothing in the distant white expanse. Before me rose the imposing bank of the Volga like a gigantic snowdrift. So barren and uninviting was this deserted view resembling eternity that my heart contracted.I turned to the right and approached quite close to the monastery enclosure. From behind the bronze gates, glimmered a dense net of crosses and gravestones. The ancient eyes of the church gazed forbiddingly down on me, and with an eerie feeling I thought of the monks sleeping at this moment in tomb-like cells together with corpses. Were any of them thinking of the hour of death on this night?("Lamia")
Boris Sadovskoy
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
He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.
Leo Tolstoy
I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max Lerner
That's one huge puppy.
Ksenia Anske
Now I understand that this passion for pain, even in the torture of martyrdom, represents the haste and impatience to no longer be interrupted and disturbed by the evil that can come from this side (meaning this life).
Lou Andreas-Salomé
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you -- and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Nikita Khrushchev
He loved her with the fire of a thousand suns, she was his solace in the chaos, his redemption.
Vladimir Lenin
What if it turns out there really are witches and vampires and werewolves living right here alongside us? After all, what better disguise could there be than to get your image enshrined in the culture of the mass media? Anything that's described in artistic terms and shown in the movies stops being frightening and mysterious. For real horror you need the spoken word, you need an old grandpa sitting on a bench, scaring the grandkids in the evening: 'And then the Master of the house came to him and said: "I won't let you go, I'll tie you up and bind you tight and you'll rot under the fallen branches!"' That's the way to make people wary of anomalous phenomena! Kids sense that, you know–it's no wonder they love telling stories about the Black Han and the Coffin on Wheels. But modern literature, and especially the movies, it all just dilutes that instinctive horror. How can you feel afraid of Dracula, if he's been killed a hundred times? How can you be afraid of aliens, if our guys always squelch them? Yes, Hollywood is the great luller of human vigilance. A toast–to the death of Hollywood, for depriving us of a healthy fear of the unknown!
Sergei Lukyanenko
Do you remember what you're supposed to do now? Kiss the palm of your hand and press it against your heart.
Paullina Simons
The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved…
Anton Chekhov
Sometimes, even those whom we consider as our close friends may betray us so easily, in a moment when we do not even expect it. Such is the truth of life, despite so many eloquent odes humanity dedicated to friendship.
Sahara Sanders
Contemplation + action = breakthrough
Lada Ray
Do whatever you want. Break stuff, touch your penis or boobs to anything, whatever.
Eugene Mirman
A dream is a strange thing. Pictures appear with terrifying clarity, the minutest details engraved like pieces of jewelry, and yet we leap unawares through huge abysses of time and space. Dreams seem to be controlled by wish rather than reason, the heart rather than the head–and yet, what clever, tricky convolutions my reason sometimes makes while I’m asleep! Things quite beyond comprehension happen to reason in dreams!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
Gary Shteyngart
Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don't want millions, but an answer to their questions.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
Never give in to peer pressure, especially if the peer is not attractive.
Eugene Mirman
Dear Jesus, do something.
Vladimir Nabokov
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable -why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something?
Andrei Platonov
Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, Gods."His eyes shone with want and predatory satisfaction. "The name's William. It's a common mistake.
Ilona Andrews
You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... but as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.
Olga Grushin
I consider jealousy a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it.
Leo Tolstoy
When you were a child, you used to run to me for protection. Now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head on your knees; I want you to be strong and wise; I want you to protect and defend me. I'm not always strong in spirit, Vitya – I can be weak too. I often think about suicide, but something holds me back – some weakness, or strength, or irrational hope.
Vasily Grossman