Quotes & Sayings About Pushkin

This, then, is the fate of your sons,
Oh Rome, oh celebrated power!
Singer of love, singer of the gods,
Tell me, what is glory?
A hollow rumbling from the grave, a praising voice,
A sound speeding from generation to generation?
Or under the shade of a smoky shelter
The tale of a wild gypsy? — Alexander Pushkin

Thus heaven's gift to us is this:
That habit takes the place of bliss. — Alexander Pushkin

My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin. — Clive James

We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin ... if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live? ... then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ... — Tom Stoppard

In alien lands I keep the body
Of ancient native rites and things:
I gladly free a little birdie
At celebration of the spring.
I'm now free for consolation,
And thankful to almighty Lord:
At least, to one of his creations
I've given freedom in this world! — Alexander Pushkin

In this, our age of infamy Man's choice is but to be A tyrant, traitor, prisoner: No other choice has he. — Alexander Pushkin

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to. — Alexander Pushkin

It's now the British Muse's fables That lie on maidens' bedside tables And haunt their dreams. They worship now The Vampire with his pensive brow, — Alexander Pushkin

Perhaps you'd like, you gentle fellow,
To hear what I'm prepared to say
On "kinfolk" and their implications?
Well, here's my view of close relations:
They're people whom we're bound to prize,
To honor, love, and idolize,
And following the old tradition,
To visit come the Christmas feast,
Or send a wish by mail at least;
All other days they've our permission,
To quite forget us if they please-
So grant them, God, long life and ease! — Alexander Pushkin

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. — Lev Shestov

The less we show our love to a woman, Or please her less, and neglect our duty, The more we trap and ruin her surely In the flattering toils of philandery. — Alexander Pushkin

I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.
The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb,
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.
Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter's whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still. — Alexander Pushkin

It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself. — Anton Chekhov

For one can live in friendship
With verses and with cards, with Plato and with wine,
And hide beneath the gentle cover of our playful pranks
A noble heart and mind. — Alexander Pushkin

[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in. — Michael D. O'Brien

Thus people
so it seems to me
Become good friends from sheer ennui. — Alexander Pushkin

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We live without power of law, like flocks of ravens
they come and sweep over the land. — Alexander Pushkin

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something. — Clive James

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths. — Alexander Pushkin

I was born for the peaceful life,
for rural quiet:
the lyre's voice in the wild is more resounding,
creative dreams are more alive.
To harmless leisures consecrated,
I wander by a wasteful lake
and far niente is my rule.
By every morn I am awakened
unto sweet mollitude and freedom;
little I read, a lot I sleep,
fugitive fame do not pursue.
Was it not thus in former years,
that I spent in inaction, in the shade,
my happiest days? — Alexander Pushkin

People are so like their first mother Eve: what they are given doesn't take their fancy. The serpent is forever enticing them to come to him, to the tree of mystery. They must have the forbidden fruit, or paradise will not be paradise for them. — Alexander Pushkin

To "seek inspiration" has always seemed to me a ridiculous and absurd fancy: inspiration cannot be sought out; it must find the poet. For — Alexander Pushkin

Play interests me very much," said Hermann: "but I am not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous. — Alexander Pushkin

Sergei recited a Pushkin poem in Russian while I recited a stanza by Racine from my French classical repertoire. Both of us, romantics at heart, were inebriated by the fresh air, the calm and the greenery surrounding us, and we decided to ride to a village where we could taste the local food and wash it down with beer for Sergei and tea for me. — Liliane Willens

Epression still kept guard on him, and chased after him like a shadow - or like a faithful wife. — Alexander Pushkin

Moscow ... how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! what store of riches it imparts! — Alexander Pushkin

God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others. — Alexander Pushkin

I foresee all: how I'll annoy
You deeply, by my sad confession:
What bitter scorn in your expression,
How proud the glance you'll employ!
What can I hope for? With what aim
Reveal my soul, and thereafter
Open myself to endless blame,
Prompting your malicious laughter? — Alexander Pushkin

Sad that our finest aspiration
Our freshest dreams and meditations,
In swift succession should decay,
Like Autumn leaves that rot away. — Alexander Pushkin

Rousseau (I'll note with your permission)
Could not conceive how solemn Grimm
Dared clean his nails in front of him,
The madcap sage and rhetorician.
Champion of rights and liberty,
In this case judged wrong-headedly.
One still can be a man of action
And mind the beauty of one's nails:
Why fight the age's predilection?
Custom's a despot and prevails. — Alexander Pushkin

Enough! Clear-souled and far from wasted,
I start upon an untrod way
To take my rest from yesterday. — Alexander Pushkin

The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky. — Svetlana Alexievich

Recalling former years' romances,
Recalling love that time enhances,
With tenderness, with not a care,
Alive, at liberty once more,
We drank, in mute intoxication,
The breath of the indulgent night!
Just as a sleepy convict might
Be carried from incarceration
Into a greenwood, so were we
Borne to our youth by reverie. — Alexander Pushkin

He's happy now, he's almost sane. — Alexander Pushkin

It was thought that the confession of the accused was indispensable to his condemnation, an idea not only unreasonable, but contrary to the most simple good sense in matters of jurisprudence; for if the denial of the accused is not accepted as proof of his innocence, the confession which is torn from him by torture ought to serve still less as proof of his guilt. — Alexander Pushkin

Want of courage is the last thing to be pardoned by young men, who usually look upon bravery as the chief of all human virtues, and the excuse for every possible fault. — Alexander Pushkin

On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin! — Nadezhda Mandelstam

But even friendship like our heroes'
Exist no more; for we've outgrown
All sentiments and deem men zeroes
Except of course ourselves alone.
We all take on Napoleon's features,
And millions of our fellow creatures
Are nothing more to us than tools ...
Since feelings are for freaks and fools.
Eugene, of course, had keen perceptions
And on the whole despised mankind,
Yet wasn't, like so many, blind;
And since each rule permits exceptions,
He did respect a noble few,
And, cold himself, gave warmth its due. — Alexander Pushkin

Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse. — Alexander Pushkin

Sauvage, sad, silent,
as timid as the sylvan doe,
in her own family
she seemed a strangeling. — Alexander Pushkin

O flowers, country, love, inaction,
O fields! I am your devotee!
I always note with satisfaction
Onegin's difference from me,
Lest somewhere a sarcastic reader
Or publisher or such-like breeder
Of complicated calumny
Discerns my physiognomy
And shamelessly repeats the fable
That I have crudely versified
Myself like Byron, bard of pride,
As if we were no longer able
To write a poem and discuss
A subject not concerning us. — Alexander Pushkin

Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the insatiability of the present, and the unforeseeability of the future. — Brian Boyd

As Pushkin put it: He had no itch to dig for glories deep in the dirt that time has laid. — Haruki Murakami

What is renoun?more false than hope by dreams engendered. — Alexander Pushkin

And these days I've come to prefer the more steady Bordeaux. I am no longer up to champagne from Ay: it's like a mistress: sparkling, flighty, vivacious, wayward - and not to be trusted. But Bordeaux is like a friend who in time of trouble and misfortune stands by us always, anywhere, ready to give us help, or just to share our quiet leisure. So raise your glasses - to our friend Bordeaux! — Alexander Pushkin

But in this world of morally-warped phenomena there are rare and happy exceptions of truly great magnitude, which always pay dearly for their exclusiveness and fall a prey to their own superiority. Natures of genius, themselves unaware of their genius, they are relentlessly killed by an unconscious society as an expiatory sacrifice to its own sins ... Such is Pushkin's Tatiana. — Vissarion Belinsky

How sad, however, if we're given
Our youth as something to betray,
And what if youth in turn is driven
To cheat on us, each hour, each day,
If our most precious aspirations,
Our freshest dreams, imaginations
In fast succession have decayed,
As leaves, in putrid autumn, fade.
It is too much to see before one
Nothing but dinners in a row,
Behind the seemly crowd to go,
Regarding life as mere decorum,
Having no common views to share,
Nor passions that one might declare. — Alexander Pushkin

I loved you; even now I may confess, Some embers of my love their fire retain; But do not let it cause you more distress, I do not want to sadden you again. Hopeless and tongue tied, yet I loved you dearly With pangs the jealous and the timid know; So tenderly I loved you, so sincerely, I pray God grant another love you so. — Alexander Pushkin

He who has lived and thought can't help
despising people in his soul;
him who has felt disturbs
the ghost of irrecoverable days;
for him there are no more enchantments;
him does the snake of memories,
him does repentance bite. — Alexander Pushkin

He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense.. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past. — Alexander Pushkin

With womankind, the less we love them, the easier they become to charm. — Alexander Pushkin

Habit is heaven's gift to us:
a substitute for happiness. — Alexander Pushkin

I am not in the position to sacrifice the essentials of life in the hope of acquiring the luxuries. -Pushkin — Alexander Pushkin

Moral commonplaces are amazingly useful when we can find little in ourselves with which to justify our actions. — Alexander Pushkin

Love passed, the Muse appeared, the weather
of mind got clarity new-found;
now free, I once more weave together
emotion, thought, and magic sound. — Alexander Pushkin

I want to understand you,
I study your obscure language. — Alexander Pushkin

When I want somebody to read to,
To match a dream with tuneful phrase,
It is my nurse that I pay heed to,
Companion of my youthful days,
Or, following a boring dinner,
A neihbour comes in, who I corner,
Catch at his coat tails suddenly
And choke him with a tragedy,
Or, (here I am no longer jesting),
Haunted by rhymes and yearning's ache,
I roam beside my country lake
And scare a flock of wild ducks resting:
Hearing my strophes' sweet-toned chants,
They fly off from the banks at once. — Alexander Pushkin

Please, never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization. — Alexander Pushkin

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason. — Alexander Pushkin

He expressed unconditional agreement with the uselessness and absurdity of the word 'fatherland'; he agreed with the idea that religion was harmful;33 but he loudly and firmly asserted that boots were inferior to Pushkin,34 — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My goddesses! Where now? Forsaken?
Oh hearken to my call, I rue:
Are you the same? Have others taken
Your place without replacing you? — Alexander Pushkin

We still, alas, cannot forestall it-
This dreadful ailment's heavy toll;
The spleen is what the English call it,
We call it simply, Russian soul. — Alexander Pushkin

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Whoever the priest is, he is called Father. — Alexander Pushkin

Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.
How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?' Daved asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. 'If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and
'
All right!'
All books are in some way about other books.'
I get it! — Steve Toltz

I was not born to amuse the Tsars. — Alexander Pushkin

Marya Morevna! Don't you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention! — Catherynne M Valente

I am married and happy. My only wish is that nothing will change. — Alexander Pushkin

He who has lived and thought can never
Help in his soul despising men,
He who has felt will be forever
Haunted by days he can't regain.
For him there are no more enchantments,
Him does the serpent of remembrance,
Him does repentance always gnaw.
All this will frequently afford
A great delight to conversations. — Alexander Pushkin

Tell him that riches will not procure for you a single moment of happiness. Luxury consoles poverty alone, and at that only for a short time, until one becomes accustomed to it. — Alexander Pushkin

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society. — Mike Tyson

Ever peaceful be you slumber
Though your days were few in number
On this earth-spite took its toll-
Yet shall heaven have your soul
With pure love we did regard you
For your loved one did we guard you
But you came not to the groom
Only to a chill dark tomb — Alexander Pushkin

Tis time, my friend, 'tis time! For rest the heart is aching; Days follow days in flight, and every day is taking Fragments of being, while together you and I Make plans to live. Look, all is dust, and we shall die. — Alexander Pushkin

Whom then to love? Whom to have faith in?
Who can there be who won't betray?
Who'll judge a deed or disputation
Obligingly by what we say?
Who'll not bestrew our path with slander?
Who'll cosset us with care and candour?
Oh, ineffectual phantom seeker
You waste your energy in vain:
Love your own self, be your own man,
My worthy, venerable reader!
A worthwhile object: surely who
Could be more lovable than you? — Alexander Pushkin

Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul. — Alexander Pushkin

My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth? — Alexander Pushkin

The forbidden cabinet. The forbidden fruit. That fruit is - a volume, a huge blue-lilac volume with a gold inscription slantwise: Collected Works of A.S. Pushkin. I read the fat Pushkin in the cabinet with my nose in the book and on the shelf, almost in darkness and almost right up against it and even a little bit suffocated by his weight that came right into the throat, and almost blinded by the nearness of the tiny letters. I read Pushkin right into the chest and right into the brain. — Marina Tsvetaeva

Bound for your distant home"

Bound for your distant home
you were leaving alien lands.
In an hour as sad as I've known
I wept over your hands.
My hands were numb and cold,
still trying to restrain
you, whom my hurt told
never to end this pain.

But you snatched your lips away
from our bitterest kiss.
You invoked another place
than the dismal exile of this.
You said, 'When we meet again,
in the shadow of olive-trees,
we shall kiss, in a love without pain,
under cloudless infinities.'

But there, alas, where the sky
shines with blue radiance,
where olive-tree shadows lie
on the waters glittering dance,
your beauty, your suffering,
are lost in eternity.
But the sweet kiss of our meeting ......
I wait for it: you owe it me ....... — Alexander Pushkin

Mistress-like, its brilliance vain, highly capricious and inane ... — Alexander Pushkin

For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante. — Robert Gottlieb

Habit is Heaven's own redress:
it takes the place of happiness. — Alexander Pushkin

Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth.
[From: 19 Lessons On Tea] — Alexander Pushkin

But whom to love?
To trust and treasure?
Who won't betray us in the end?
And who'll be kind enough to measure
Our words and deeds as we intend? — Alexander Pushkin

A man who's active and incisive can yet keep nail-care much in mind: why fight what's known to be decisive? custom is despot of mankind. — Alexander Pushkin

Such a beginning presaged nothing good. However, I lost neither courage nor hope. I turned to the consolation of all those in distress, and for the first time tasted the sweetness of prayer, poured forth from a pure but riven heart. I fell asleep serenely, unworried as to what was to become of me. — Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin wrote Turkish poems and he was never in Turkey. — Ilya Ilf

Thank you, darling, for learning to play chess. It is an absolute necessity for any well organized family. (in a letter to his wife) — Alexander Pushkin

It's a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions - like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at wayside inn. — Alexander Pushkin

I've lived to se my longings die
I've lived to se my longings die:
My dreams and I have grown apart;
Now only sorrow haunts my eye,
The wages of a bitter heart.
Beneath the storms of hostile fate,
My flowery wreath has faded fast;
I live alone and sadly wait
To see when death will come at last.
Just so, when the winds in winter moan
And snow descends in frigid flakes,
Upon a naked branch, alone,
The final leaf of summer shakes! ... — Alexander Pushkin

From an evil dog be glad of a handful of hairs. — Alexander Pushkin

Actually on the point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at that moment that all this was out of Pushkin's Silvio and Lermontov's Masquerade. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

TO MY MIND, PUSHKIN BEST SUMS UP THE SEASON: Lovely summer, how I could cherish you / If heat and dust and gnats and flies were banished. — Paul Russell

It is better to have dreamed a thousand dreams that never were than never to have dreamed at all. — Alexander Pushkin

We still have our television and our books, our imagination. Children grow up in their houses, without the forest and the river. They can only look at them. These are completely different children. And I go to them and recite Pushkin, who I thought was eternal. And then I have this terrible thought: what if our entire culture is just an old trunk with a bunch of stale manuscripts? Everything I love . . . He: — Svetlana Alexievich

Young man! If my notes should fall into your hands, remember that the best and most enduring changes are those which stem from an improvement in moral behaviour, without any violent upheaval. — Alexander Pushkin

In fiction, I have been on a Zweig kick. In England over December, I noticed that many British newspapers' year-end recommenders were praising the Pushkin Press for reissuing several works by Stefan Zweig, a brilliant Austrian writer whose work brings to mind that of his compatriot Joseph Roth ... these fictions are a treat of prewar European literature — Sylvia Brownrigg

I love a friendly chat and a friendly glass of wine during the evening - the time they call, for some accountable reason, 'between dog and wolf'. — Alexander Pushkin

In a morbid condition, dreams are often distinguished by their remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality. The resulting picture is sometimes monstrous, but the setting and the whole process of the presentation sometimes happen to be so probable, and with details so subtle, unexpected, yet artistically consistent with the whole fullness of the picture, that even the dreamer himself would be unable to invent them in reality, though he were as much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev. Such dreams, morbid dreams, are always long remembered and produce a strong impression on the disturbed and already excited organism of the person.Raskolnikov had a terrible dream. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world. — Alexander Pushkin