However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.
IVAN TURGENEVA 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.
More Ivan Turgenev Quotes
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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 -
Whatever a person may pray for, that person prays for a miracle. Every prayer comes down to this – Almighty God, grant that two times two not equal four.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Don’t force me into saying what I don’t want to say, and what I won’t say.
IVAN TURGENEV -
I am a flirt: I have no heart: I have an actor’s nature.
IVAN TURGENEV -
It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Go and try to disprove death. Death will disprove you, and that’s all!
IVAN TURGENEV -
It’s all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.
IVAN TURGENEV -
What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.
IVAN TURGENEV -
You may live a long while with some people and be on friendly terms with them and never speak openly with them from your soul.
IVAN TURGENEV -
The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they’ve suddenly become nihilists.
IVAN TURGENEV -
A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.
IVAN TURGENEV -
I only know that I feel tired, antiquated; I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.
IVAN TURGENEV -
A person who gets angry at his own illness is sure to overcome it.
IVAN TURGENEV -
That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Oh, gentle feelings, soft sounds, the goodness and the gradual stilling of a soul that has been moved; the melting happiness of the first tender, touching joys of love- where are you?
IVAN TURGENEV -
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.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Every man’s happiness is built on the unhappi-ness of another.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late.
IVAN TURGENEV -
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 TURGENEV -
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.
IVAN TURGENEV -
That’s what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.
IVAN TURGENEV -
What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
IVAN TURGENEV -
Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.
IVAN TURGENEV -
I share no man’s opinions; I have my own.
IVAN TURGENEV