Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 37

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
I ... having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them -- that is, I wish to destroy that by which I live.
Leo Tolstoy
It's bad to be unable to stand solitude.
Leo Tolstoy
Any idiot can face a crisis-it's day to day living that wears you out.
Anton Chekhov
Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
Vasily Grossman
Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.
Leo Tolstoy
You're on your own little quest, an there's a bit of Frodo Baggins in you, and a bit of Verne's Paganel, and just a tiny drop of Robinson Cursoe, and a smidgeon of Radishchev.
Sergei Lukyanenko
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
Vladimir Nabokov
If your parents left you, it doesn’t mean that other people will also do it to you.
Olga Goa
There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.
Gary Shteyngart
Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.
Georges Gurdjieff
August was nearly over - the month of apples and falling stars, the last care-free month for the school children. The days were not hot, but sunny and limpidly clear - the first sign of advancing autumn.
Victor Nekrasov
I was told that this road would take me to the ocean of death, and turned back halfway. Since then crooked, round-about, godforsaken paths stretch out before me.
Arkady Strugatsky
On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Even a small amount of unplanned downtime can effect a company’s profitability and reputation.
Ratmir Timashev
You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.
Leo Tolstoy
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Dye a specsuit any color other than the original red, and any stalker would put down five hundred for it without batting an eyelash”“It’s light, comfortable, not too tight, and you don’t sweat in it from the heat. You can go right through a fire in this thing, and no gas will penetrate it. It’s even bulletproof, they say. Of course, fire toxic gas, and bullets -these are only Earth perils. The Zone doesn't have those; in the Zone you have other worries.
Arkady Strugatsky
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
If you harbor preferred principles and ways of behaving that have never brought you ANY happiness, or even much luck in your personal relationships over a number of years—this should not be taken as a sign that all women are bad or that none of them are serious, butA SIGN THAT YOUR OWN ATTITUDE AND DATING STRATEGIES ARE FLAWED AND NOT REALLY SUCCESSFUL—and can only bring you further disappointments with women!It seems like an elementary, easy thing to accept. Strangely, thousands of people seem, for some reason, to be unable, or stubbornly refuse, to see the truth and draw such a logical conclusion.
Sahara Sanders
Everyone's afraid, but I'm not. Because I loved your father my whole life. I still do.
Mikhail Shishkin
If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.
Anna Akhmatova
Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.
Vladimir Nabokov
A protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work.
Trotsky
All our life we had been dreaming to get through every little hole into this beautiful and unfamiliar world where parents and children love each other not for something but in spite of everything, to plunge into this fairy world entirely, settle down and live there. So why didn’t I feel happy when it happened for real?
Igor Eliseev
My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.
Gary Shteyngart
knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith
Yevgeny Zamyatin
I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.
Anton Chekhov
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Vladimir Nabokov
Though these young men unhappily fail tounderstand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest ofall sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years oftheir seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiplytenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have setbefore them as their goal--such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strengthof many of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens? Is it possible that man's heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to destroy his fellows? All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.
Leo Tolstoy
...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
Leon Trotsky
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Probably, sooner or later every person founds oneself to be needless.
Igor Eliseev
Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism.
Leon Trotsky
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
Maxim Gorky
Modern formulaic society will try to make you "normal," rushing to call pseudoscientific anything you can do that they can’t.
Sahara Sanders
There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst…
Vladimir Nabokov
You have to be an artist and a madman...
Vladimir Nabokov
Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still... Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a serious expression came into her face. She was thinking of no one and of nothing at that moment, and from her smiling mouth poured forth notes, those notes that anyone can produce at the same intervals, and hold for the same length of time, yet a thousand times leave us cold, and the thousand and first time they set us thrilling and weeping.
Leo Tolstoy
Through her the battling man becomes sublime,and fairy tales are spun from gray-maned storms;From moments' tears immortal pearls are formedAnd dulcet wonders cradle bloody times("She Rests")
Konstantin Balmont
We are pagans. We deify each other.
Lara Biyuts
I just always want to be different - THE EXCEPTION - and this weekend knocked me right back to reality.And the reality is - I AM TRULY BLESSED ..
Jon-Robert Holden
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
Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy
Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.
Ivan Turgenev
Thus heaven's gift to us is this: That habit takes the place of bliss.
Alexander Pushkin
The criminal who revolted against society hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. In spite of different opinions, everyone will acknowledge that there are acts which everywhere and always, under no matter what legal system, are beyond doubt criminal, and should be regarded as long as man is man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Politicians sre the same all over.They promise to build bridges, even where there are no rivers.
Nikita Khrushev
Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn't count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he'd see that there's enough of both lots for him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I love it when people lie! Lying is only man's privilege over all other organisms. Lying is what makes me a man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov
It's awful to be rich and mind-boggingly handsome and have women fawn over you. My heart bleeds for you. Poor dear, how do you manage?
Ilona Andrews
Every man has two counties--his own and America.
Max Lerner
Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.
Konstantin Stanislavski
What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
Leo Tolstoy