The Russian Soul Quotes

#1. The Russian soul is a dark place.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#2. Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

Joseph Conrad

#3. The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.

Svetlana Alexievich

#4. Russian literature saved my soul. When I was a young girl in school and I asked what is good and what is evil, no one in that corrupt system could show me.

Irina Ratushinskaya

#5. Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

P.G. Wodehouse

#6. We still, alas, cannot forestall it-
This dreadful ailment's heavy toll;
The spleen is what the English call it,
We call it simply, Russian soul.

Alexander Pushkin

#7. If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

Noel Coward

#8. RUSSIAN, n. A person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul. A Tartar Emetic.

Ambrose Bierce

#9. The innards of Ping's G5 were supposedly computer-engineered with a process called "finite-element analysis," a term that for all I know was stolen from an old Star Trek episode.

Carl Hiaasen

#10. Oh! he understood that for the humble soul of the Russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil, and still more by the everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world's, it was the greatest need and comfort to find some one or something holy to fall down before and worship.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#11. That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

D.H. Lawrence

#12. And it has always been a mystery, and I've marveled a thousand times at this ability of man (and, it seems, of the Russian man above all) to cherish the highest ideal in his soul alongside the greatest baseness, and all that in perfect sincerity.
The Adolescent (or, The Raw Youth)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#13. Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

Julian Barnes

#14. One of the plagues of our day is that it's easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of massive violence, poverty and injustice around the globe...One of the greatest needs in this country is for us to have some hope, and to feel empowered that as ordinary people we can make a difference.

David Hartsough

#15. Oh, he understood very well that for the meek soul of a simple Russian, exhausted by grief and hardship and, above all, by constant injustice and sin, his own or the world's, there was no stronger need than to find a holy shrine or a saint to prostrate himself before and to worship.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#16. Memories did that to you. They glorified the past until the real thing was often a letdown, making you wonder why you had craved it so assiduously in the first place.

Melanie Milburne

#17. The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him
news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same.

Kurt Vonnegut

#18. Exercise is a powerful weapon and scientifically proven to be as effective at battling depression as medication is---with fewer side effects.

Jay Danek

#19. For some reason, on that sparkling afternoon last week, I actually saw the coal that was passing by and it set me to thinking how important coal was to our everyday lives when I was a little boy.

Nick Clooney

#20. Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul. "The soul is a mirage," I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway.

Charles Simic

#21. Rose Gardner, what in heaven's name happened

Denise Grover Swank

#22. You know, there must be happiness somewhere, when a lawyer dies.

J.P. Donleavy