Ivan Goncharov Quotes

#1. Love was life's hardest school of all.
p. 259

Ivan Goncharov

#2. What? Do you suppose the intellect can work separately from the heart?

Ivan Goncharov

#3. The trouble is that no devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life ... My life began by flickering out.

Ivan Goncharov

#4. Now or neverI 'To be or not to be!' - Oblomov raised himself from his chair a little, but failing to find his slippers with his feet at once, sat down again.

Ivan Goncharov

#5. Memories are the height of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain.

Ivan Goncharov

#6. Life is duty and obligation, therefore love, too, is a duty. It's as if God sent it to me,' she said, looking up at the sky, 'and told me to love.'
p. 265

Ivan Goncharov

#7. A close, daily intimacy between two people has to be paid for: it requires a great deal of experience of life, logic, and warmth of heart on both sides to enjoy each other's good qualities without being irritated by each other's shortcomings and blaming each other for them.

Ivan Goncharov

#8. Yesterday one has wished, to-day one attains the madly longed-for object, and to-morrow one will blush to think that one ever desired it.

Ivan Goncharov

#9. I began life with a quenching of the light of day, and, from the first moment that I realized myself, realized also that I was on the wane.

Ivan Goncharov

#10. Yes, and I think I will have enough strength to live and love my whole life through. One without the other is impossible.
p. 265

Ivan Goncharov

#11. Memories are either the greatest poetry, when they are memories of a vital happiness, or a burning pain, when they touch dried wounds.
p. 479

Ivan Goncharov

#12. But in love, merit is won blindly and unaccountably, and in this blindness and unaccountability lies happiness.
pp. 445-446

Ivan Goncharov

#13. For, as every one knows, dogs cannot with equanimity see a human being running.

Ivan Goncharov

#14. It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.

Ivan Goncharov

#15. When you don't know what you're living for, you don't care how you live from one day to the next. You're happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you're going to live for tomorrow.

Ivan Goncharov

#16. The common herd of "burghers", those cattle, complete with horns, who turn millstones with their bare hands.

Ivan Goncharov