Explore Quotes by Ivan Turgenev

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.

I am a flirt: I have no heart: I have an actor's nature.

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

That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.

The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.

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

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.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.

Great God, grant that twice two be not four.

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

a person who gets angry at his own illness is sure to overcome it

What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.

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

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?

It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.

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?

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

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!

Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn't abide such happiness and ran away.