Ivan Turgenev
Novelist
1818-10-28
Quotes by Ivan Turgenev
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That's what children are for— that their parents may not be bored.
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The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.
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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.
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It's 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've 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.
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We're young, we're not monsters, no fools: we'll conquer happiness for ourselves.
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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!
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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!
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It's 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've 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.
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We're young, we're not monsters, no fools: we'll conquer happiness for ourselves.
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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.
Read quote -
That's what children are for— that their parents may not be bored.
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The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.
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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!
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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.
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To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
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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.
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A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.
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Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.
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Every man's happiness is built on the unhappi-ness of another.
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The confined space I occupy is so minute when compared with the rest of the universe, where I am not and have no business to be; and the fraction of time I shall live is so infinitesimal when contrasted with eternity, in which I have never been and never shall be ... And yet here, in this atom of myself, in this mathematical point, blood circulates, the brain is active, aspiring to something too ...
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