Ivan Turgenev

We__e young, we__e not monsters, no fools: we__l conquer happiness for ourselves.

You are an old pig!'one of them said to the other. 'And that is worse than being a young one.

Can it be thattheir prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love,sacred devoted love, is not all powerful? Oh, no! Howeverpassionate, sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, theflowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes;they tell us not only of eternal peace, of that great peace of"indifferent" nature; they tell us also of eternal reconciliation andof life without end.

Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Glafira Petrovna's estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it.

I want everything or nothing. A life for a life, taking one and giving up another without hesitation and beyond recall. Or else better have nothing!

The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.

That's what children are for__hat their parents may not be bored.

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.

Whereas I think: I__ lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don__ occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I__ fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven__ existed and won__ exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

It__ strange how things happen in life: you live with someone for a long time, you are on the best of terms, yet you never once speak to them frankly and from the heart; with someone else, you__e hardly even got acquainted - and there you are: as if at confession, one or other of you is blurting out all his most intimate secrets.

In the end, nature is inexorable: it has no reason to hurry and, sooner or later, it takes what belongs to it. Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to its own laws, it doesn't know art, just as it doesn't know freedom, just as it doesn't know goodness.

In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!

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.

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

Women... can't live with 'em... can't shoot 'em.

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

People without firmness of character love to make up a fate for themselves that relieves them of the necessity of having their own will and of taking responsibility for themselves.