Best Turgenev Quotes & Sayings

We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: It's all about security, social companionships, and a full belly. There is obvious tension between both views, which recalls that famous dinner conversation between a Russian literary critic and the writer Ivan Turgenev: 'We haven't yet solved the problem of God,' the critic yelled, 'and you want to eat! — Frans De Waal

It's strange how things happen in life: you live with someone for a long time, you are on the best of terms, yet you never once speak to them frankly and from the heart; with someone else, you've hardly even got acquainted - and there you are: as if at confession, one or other of you is blurting out all his most intimate secrets. — Ivan Turgenev

The appearance of mediocrity is often useful in life because it weakens tautly strung strings and sobers up people's self-confident or self-forgetful feelings, reminding them how close they are to mediocrity as well. — Ivan Turgenev

I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind. — Ivan Turgenev

Yes" Bazarov began, "man's a strange being. When you look at a quiet, dull life, like my good parents' life here, cursorily or from a distance, you think - what could be better? Eat, drink and know you're acting in the most correct, sensible way. But that's not how it is. Boredom descends. You want to engage with people, even if just to shout at them, but still engage with them. — Ivan Turgenev

Naturally, she had enemies. Her success, her sex, her racial origin and her bohemian extravagance reminded the puritanical why actors used to be buried in unhallowed ground. And over the decades her acting style, once so original, inevitably dated, since naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel. If the magic always worked for some - Ellen Terry called her "transparent as an azalea" and compared her stage presence to "smoke from a burning paper" - others were less kind. Turgenev, though a Francophile and himself a dramatist, found her "false, cold, affected," and condemned her "repulsive Parisian chic. — Julian Barnes

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

Nezhdanov's heart began to beat violently and he lowered his eyes involuntarily. This girl, who had fallen in love with a homeless wretch like him, who trusted him, who was ready to follow him, to go with him towards one and the same goal - this wonderful girl - Marianna - at that moment was, for Nezhdanov, the embodiment of everything good and just on earth; the embodiment of that love, that of a family, sister or wife, which he had not experienced; the embodiment of homeland, happiness, struggle and freedom. — Ivan Turgenev

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

I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that's one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That's the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection. — Marco Roth

But the old 1840s split between the religious, patriotic, Slavophile establishment and the progressive, humane, revolutionary Westernizers was giving way to the exacerbated conflict between the alienated positivist radicals of the 1860s who adopted the name Turgenev had given them, Nihilists, and those who thanked Russian Nationalism, Orthodoxy and Autocracy for the bloodless liberation of the serfs, introduction of trial by jury, reduction of the draft from twenty-five to five years, partial decentralization of — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art. — Ivan Turgenev

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

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

What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite. — Ivan Turgenev

Fathers and Sons
Arkaday watching Katya's face as she accepts his marriage proposal:
Anyone who has never seen such tears in the eyes of a beloved one cannot fathom to what extent, all overcome with gratitude and shame, a human being can be happy on earth.
Bazarov on his death bed:
I am done for. I've fallen under the wheel. And it transpires that there was no point in thinking about the future. It's an old story, is death, but to every man it comes anew. — Ivan Turgenev

I assure you, Alexandra Pavlovna,' said Pigasov slowly, 'nothing can be worse and more injurious than good-fortune that comes too late. It cannot give you pleasure in any way, and it deprives you of the right
the precious right
of complaining and cursing Providence. Yes, madam, it's a cruel and insulting trick
belated fortune. — Ivan Turgenev

Beware of the love of women; beware of that ecstasy - that slow poison. — Ivan Turgenev

I must say, though, that a man who has staked his whole life on the card of a woman's love and who, when that card is trumped, falls to pieces and lets himself go to the dogs
a fellow like that is not a man, not a male. You say he's unhappy
you know best. But all the nonsense hasn't been taken out of him yet. I'm sure he really believes he's a smart fellow just because he reads that rag Galignani and saves a muzhik from a flogging once a month. — Ivan Turgenev

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

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

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

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

Woe to the heart that has not loved in youth! — Ivan Turgenev

I look up to heaven only when I want to sneeze. — Ivan Turgenev

Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we're absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand. — Ivan Turgenev

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

From lips indifferent of her death I heard,
Indifferently I listened to it, too,'
were echoing in my heart. O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe - even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art self-confident and insolent; thou sayest, 'I alone am living - look you!' - but thy days fly by all the while, and vanish without trace or reckoning; and everything in thee vanishes, like wax in the sun, like snow ... . And, perhaps, the whole secret of thy charm lies, not in being able to do anything, but in being able to think thou wilt do anything; lies just in thy throwing to the winds, forces which thou couldst not make other use of; in each of us gravely regarding himself as a prodigal, gravely supposing that he is justified in saying, 'Oh, what might I not have done if I had not wasted my time! — Ivan Turgenev

It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her. — Ivan Turgenev

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse? — Ivan Turgenev

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

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems. — Theodore Dalrymple

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

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