Nature creates while destroying, and doesn’t care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn’t extinguished, as long as death doesn’t lose its rights.
IVAN TURGENEVEveryone needs help from everyone else.
More Ivan Turgenev Quotes
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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.
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Even nightingales can’t be fed on fairy tales.
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All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sorts of difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.
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The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they’ve suddenly become nihilists.
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Love isn’t actually a feeling at all–it’s an illness, a certain condition of body and soul…. Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will–just like cholera or a fever.
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Take what you can yourself, and don’t let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.
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What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
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Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he’s something innately superior, something eternal–and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.
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What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?
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Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself.
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I only know that I feel tired, antiquated; I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.
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Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late.
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I don’t see why it’s impossible to express everything that’s on one’s mind.
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The temerity to believe in nothing.
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I never started from ideas but always from character.
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Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.
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Go forward while you can, but if your strength fails you, sit down near the road and gaze without anger or envy at those who pass by. They don’t have far to go, either.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don’t notice whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.
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Significance is sweet.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Death is like a fisherman, who, having caught a fish in his net, leaves it in the water for a time; the fish continues to swim about, but all the while the net is round it, and the fisherman will snatch it out in his own good time.
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Belonging to oneself–the whole essence of life lies in that.
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We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we’re barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.
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I’m through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me…. If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa.
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Illness isn’t the only thing that spoils the appetite.
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The past was a dream wasn’t it? And who ever remembers dreams?
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I was as happy as a fish in water, and I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.
IVAN TURGENEV