Ivan Turgenev Quotes

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

Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late.

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.

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.

We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars.

The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling.

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.

Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.

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

The temerity to believe in nothing.

Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

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

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

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don't notice whether it's passing quickly or slowly.

Life deceives everyone except the individual who doesn't contemplate it, the individual who demands nothing from it, the individual who serenely accepts its few gifts and serenely makes the most of them.

Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.

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

I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.

What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.

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.

There are some moments in life, some feelings; one can only point to them and pass by.

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

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.

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.