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 TurgenevRead
If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Waiting for perfect conditions can prevent us from taking action.
This quote emphasizes the importance of taking initiative and starting tasks even when circumstances aren't ideal. It suggests that if we constantly wait for everything to be perfectly aligned, we may never take the first step towards our goals or projects, thus missing opportunities for growth and achievement.
Themes
ActionInitiativePerfectionismReadinessBeginning
In practice
Example use cases
Encouraging a friend who is hesitant about starting a new project due to fear of failure.
More from Ivan Turgenev
All quotes →To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
Ivan TurgenevRead
So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.
Ivan TurgenevRead
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!
Ivan TurgenevRead
Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.
Ivan TurgenevRead
I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.
Ivan TurgenevRead
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