Russian Poet Quotes & Sayings

The point of wisdom is when the heaven takes you higher than what you expect of what you know. — Auliq Ice

It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things; and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable. — William Penn

Smartass Disciple: Master, why do some people so stubborn and unruly ?
Master of Stupidity: Only when you want them do according to your wish. — Toba Beta

Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam. — Christian Wiman

I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper. — Joseph Brodsky

Here's how I used to think
you made a book:
a poet comes along,
mouth half open, inspired,
then suddenly the idiot bursts into song -
fancy that! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

I bury my mind in my book, the Bible. Every morning it's the first thing that I do. I've been doing it for years and years. So I want to come back here [to Israel] to see the places that I read about every day. It's very important to my faith to feed [my] spirit in Israel. — Bobby McFerrin

Compared with the addiction to perfect forms, cocaine is a pastime for stationmasters. But — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge
desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138] — Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Medicine no doubt, has helped us a lot to cure so many diseases, but death still remains an incurable one! — Mehek Bassi

I've nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is that we're actually living on a planet in space. For me that's an extraordinary thought. It's mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can't see the universe for eye liner. — Jostein Gaarder

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of. — John Dos Passos

Native Soil

There's
Nobody simpler than us, or with
more pride, or fewer tears.
(1922)

Our hearts don't wear it as an amulet,
it doesn't sob beneath the poet's hand,
nor irritate the wounds we can't forget
in our bitter sleep. It's not the Promised Land.
Our souls don't calculate its worth
as a commodity to be sold and bought;
sick, and poor, and silent on this earth,
often we don't give it a thought.
Yes, for us it's the dirt on our galoshes,
yes, for us it's the grit between our teeth.
Dust, and we grind and crumble and crush it,
the gentle and unimplicated earth.
But we'll lie in it, become its weeds and flowers,
so unembarrassedly we call it - ours. — Anna Akhmatova

There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling. — Vladimir Nabokov

A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war. — Max Hastings

The animals are the most important partners for the humans on earth. They unconditionally sustain us. — Franki Storlie

Promises, like gardens need weeding from time to time to produce healthy results. — Soul Dancer