Ivan Turgenev

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.

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.

If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.

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!

Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.

I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.

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.

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.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.

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!

That's what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.

There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic_x000D_ and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.

We’re young, we’re not monsters, no fools: we’ll conquer happiness for ourselves.

I'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it.

However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of "indifferent" nature: they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.

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.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.

Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself.