Ivan Turgenev > Quotes

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late. It can give no pleasure, yet it deprives you of that most precious of rights - the right to swear and curse at your fate!”
― Ivan S. Turgenev, Rudin

“Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!”
― Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“As we all know, time sometimes flies like a bird, and sometimes
crawls like a worm, but people may be unusually happy when they do not
even notice whether time has passed quickly or slowly”
― Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“I was afraid of looking into my heart...afraid of thinking seriously about anything...I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved...”
― Ivan Turgenev

“So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me — a long, long road without a goal...”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“O youth! youth! you go your way heedless, uncaring – as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow. You are self-confident and insolent and you say, 'I alone am alive – behold!' even while your own days fly past and vanish without trace and without number, and everything within you melts away like wax in the sun .. like snow .. and perhaps the whole secret of your enchantment lies not, indeed, in your power to do whatever you may will, but in your power to think that there is nothing you will not do: it is this that you scatter to the winds – gifts which you could never have used to any other purpose. Each of us feels most deeply convinced that he has been too prodigal of his gifts – that he has a right to cry, 'Oh, what could I not have done, if only I had not wasted my time.”
― Ivan Turgenev, First Love

“A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“I look up to heaven only when I want to sneeze.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind.”
― Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“…Many things interested her, and nothing satisfied her entirely.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“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

“I burnt as in a fire in her presence ... but what did I care to know what the fire was in which I burned and melted--it was enough that it was sweet to burn and melt.”
― Ivan Turgenev, First Love

“It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Take for yourself what you can, and don't be ruled by others; to belong to oneself - the whole savour of life lies in that.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Spring Torrents

“A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away. ”
― Ivan Turgenev

“Death's an old story, but new for each person.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children: Introduction by John Bayley

“It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.”
― Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Behind me there are already so many memories (...) Lots of memories, but no point in remembering them, and ahead of me a long, long road with nothing to aim for ... I just don't want to go along it.”
― Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“My son,' he wrote to me, 'fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison....”
― Ivan Turgenev, First Love

“There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic
and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.”
― Ivan Turgenev, First Love

“I'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“Every man hangs by a thread, any minute the abyss may open under his feet, and yet he must go and invent for himself all kinds of troubles and spoil his life.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“a person who gets angry at his own illness is sure to overcome it”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.”
― Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Take for yourself what you can, and don’t be ruled by others; to belong to oneself—the whole savour of life lies in that,”
― Ivan Turgenev, First Love

“However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of "indifferent" nature: they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.”
― Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons