Top 100 Turgenev Quotes
#1. The young woman quoted Turgenev, "If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly or even harm him, you reproach him with every defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself.
Jack Vance
#2. We did it!" I said, feeling limp with relief. "It actually worked!"
Dr. Turgenev rubbed his forehead. "I had very big doubts."
"Big doubts?" I said weakly.
The Russian scientist shrugged. "I am pessimist," he said.
Kenneth Oppel
#3. In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.
Ernest Hemingway,
#5. Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
Ben Okri
#6. Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.
Charles Bukowski
#7. I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.
Rita Mae Brown
#8. I always, always meant to be on stage. I only ended up even auditioning for television and movies because I was understudying a Turgenev play on Broadway and was so broke that, when I got a mini-series, I had to take it and was so ashamed because I was such a snob.
Jennifer Garner
#9. A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?
Ivan Turgenev
#10. 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.
Ivan Turgenev
#11. A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.
Ivan Turgenev
#12. But I had absolutely lost all sense of personal dignity, and could not tear myself away from the spectacle of my own misery.
Ivan Turgenev
#13. We're young, we're not monsters, no fools: we'll conquer happiness for ourselves.
Ivan Turgenev
#14. I am a flirt: I have no heart: I have an actor's nature.
Ivan Turgenev
#15. They had much discussion upon the question whether marriage was a prejudice or a crime, and whether men were born equal or not, and precisely what individuality consists in. Things
Ivan Turgenev
#16. It's fun talking to you ... like walking on the edge of a precipice. At first one's nervous but then courage takes over from somewhere.
Ivan Turgenev
#17. Every man's happiness is built on the unhappi-ness of another.
Ivan Turgenev
#18. Arkardy went on,with the air of a man who has got into a bog,feels that he is sinking further and further in every step, and yet hurries onwards in the hope of crossing it as soon as possible
Ivan Turgenev
#19. It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.
Ivan Turgenev
#20. There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person
it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life ... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.
Ivan Turgenev
#21. Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.
Ivan Turgenev
#22. I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.
Ivan Turgenev
#23. However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.
Ivan Turgenev
#24. Looking about me, listening and recalling what the day had been like, I suddenly felt a secret unease in my heart and raised my eyes to the sky, but even in the sky there seemed to be no tranquillity. Dotted with stars, it constantly quivered and danced and shivered.
Ivan Turgenev
#25. Nowhere does time pass as swiftly as in Russia, though they say that in prison it passes even more quickly.
Ivan Turgenev
#29. 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 sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.
Ivan Turgenev
#30. We sit in the mud ... and reach for the stars.
Ivan Turgenev
#31. Death doesn't come running, but you can't run away from it, neither; nor must you be helping it along.
Ivan Turgenev
#32. Illness isn't the only thing that spoils the appetite.
Ivan Turgenev
#33. 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
#34. After all, when you think of it, nothing is stronger in the world...and weaker--than a word!
Ivan Turgenev
#35. Take for yourself what you can, and don't be ruled by others; to belong to oneself - the whole savour of life lies in that.
Ivan Turgenev
#36. I do not know what the heart of a bad man is like. But i do know what the heart of a good man is like. And it is terrible.
Ivan Turgenev
#37. She tore herself away, and went out. And I went away. I cannot describe the emotion with which I went away. I should not wish it ever to come again; but I should think myself unfortunate had I never experienced such an emotion.
Ivan Turgenev
#38. 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
#39. I want everything or nothing. A life for a life, taking one and giving up another without hesitation and beyond recall. Or else better have nothing!
Ivan Turgenev
#40. Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?
Ivan Turgenev
#41. I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind.
Ivan Turgenev
#43. Death is something ancient, but it comes fresh to each of us.
Ivan Turgenev
#44. It's amazing how man still believes in words. For example, if you call him a fool and don't beat him, he'll be wretched. Call him a genius and don't give him any money - he'll be quite satisfied.
Ivan Turgenev
#45. The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.
Ivan Turgenev
#46. One may speak about anything on earth with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but one only speaks about oneself with avidity.
Ivan Turgenev
#47. As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there's no point in waiting for so-called blissful moments, for inspiration; if it comes, so much the better
but you keep working anyway.
Ivan Turgenev
#48. My dear Natalya Petrovna, there's funny and funny.
Ivan Turgenev
#49. What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.
Ivan Turgenev
#50. 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
#51. And was it his destined part /
Only one moment in his life /
To be close to your heart?
Ivan Turgenev
#52. What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
Ivan Turgenev
#53. Both men felt uncomfortable. Each knew the other understood him. That kind of knowledge is agreeable for friends, and for enemies very disagreeable, especially when they can't either have it out or separate.
Ivan Turgenev
#54. Was coming to that troubled twilight time, a time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth is past but old age has not yet come.
Ivan Turgenev
#55. Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Glafira Petrovna's estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it.
Ivan Turgenev
#56. Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.
Ivan Turgenev
#57. Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.
Ivan Turgenev
#58. No! I cannot love people whom I find that I look down on. I need someone who would himself master me, but then, goodness me, I shall never come across anyone like that. I will never fall into anybody's clutches, never, never.
Ivan Turgenev
#59. To tell about a drunken muzhik's beating his wife is incomparably harder than to compose a whole tract about the 'woman question.'
Ivan Turgenev
#60. Every man hangs by a thread, any minute the abyss may open under his feet, and yet he must go and invent for himself all kinds of troubles and spoil his life.
Ivan Turgenev
#61. the sound of one's own voice has a powerful effect on any man,
Ivan Turgenev
#62. Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself ...
Ivan Turgenev
#63. Every single man hangs by a thread, a bottomless pit can open beneath him any minute, and yet he still goes on thinking up unpleasantnesses for himself and making a mess of his life.
Ivan Turgenev
#64. 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.
Ivan Turgenev
#65. [ ... ] no carrot would be permitted in a soup that had not first assumed a rhomboidal or trapezoidal shape.
Ivan Turgenev
#66. I was afraid of looking into my heart ... afraid of thinking seriously about anything ... I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved ...
Ivan Turgenev
#67. There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic
and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.
Ivan Turgenev
#68. Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
Ivan Turgenev
#69. Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.
Ivan Turgenev
#70. It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.
Ivan Turgenev
#71. In my case there was no first love. I began with the second.
Ivan Turgenev
#72. In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend's suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!
Ivan Turgenev
#73. I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.
Ivan Turgenev
#74. There are some moments in life, some feelings; one can only point to them and pass by.
Ivan Turgenev
#75. I burnt as in a fire in her presence ... but what did I care to know what the fire was in which I burned and melted
it was enough that it was sweet to burn and melt.
Ivan Turgenev
#76. If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.
Ivan Turgenev
#77. 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
#78. Weak people never put an end to things themselves. They always wait for the end.
Ivan Turgenev
#79. Oh, sweet emotions, gentle harmony, goodness and peace of the
softened heart, melting bliss of the first raptures of love, where are they,
where are they?
Ivan Turgenev
#80. The man who has not seen such tears in the eyes of his beloved does not know the height of happiness to which, with mingled joy and gratitude and modesty, a woman can attain.
Ivan Turgenev
#81. 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.
Ivan Turgenev
#82. To be young and not to know how, is bearable; to be old and not have the strength, is too great a weight to carry. And what's is so painful you can't sense your powers leaving you. It's hard for an old man to ensure such blows!
Ivan Turgenev
#83. 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
#84. The enchanted world arising out of the dim mists of the past, into which he just stepped, quivered-and disappeared.
Ivan Turgenev
#85. Know how to will, and you will be free, and will lead.
Ivan Turgenev
#86. Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late. It can give no pleasure, yet it deprives you of that most precious of rights - the right to swear and curse at your fate!
Ivan Turgenev
#87. I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve ...
Ivan Turgenev
#88. Mad people all live a long time - you know, every grief has its good side.
Ivan Turgenev
#89. 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
#90. To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
Ivan Turgenev
#92. Sentimental outbreaks are like liquorice; when first you suck it, it's not bad, but afterwards it leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.
Ivan Turgenev
#93. I never started from ideas but always from character.
Ivan Turgenev
#94. The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?
Ivan Turgenev
#95. As we all know, time sometimes flies like a bird, and sometimes
crawls like a worm, but people may be unusually happy when they do not
even notice whether time has passed quickly or slowly
Ivan Turgenev
#96. How sad that youth, with all its power,
Was given us in vain, to burn;
That we betrayed it every hour,
And were deceived by it in turn;
Ivan Turgenev
#97. People without firmness of character love to make up a fate for themselves; that relieves them of the necessity of having their own will and of taking responsibility for themselves.
Ivan Turgenev
#98. His little eyes, which looked as if they'd literally been hammered into place, gazed out fixedly and uncomfortably, and he also had a way of laughing uncomfortably with an abrupt, wooden laugh.
Ivan Turgenev
#99. 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!
Ivan Turgenev
#100. Do you know what really makes man free?'
'What?'
'Will, your own will, and it gives power which is better than liberty. Know how to want, and you'll be free, and you'll be master too.
Ivan Turgenev
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