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Quotes by Russian Authors
"If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth."
"You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas."
"When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of human."
"This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity-that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself-and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!"
"The only difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too."
"No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim."
"Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts."
"We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does."
"My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science."
"I don't know what being an Everest guide means. I am a coach, not a guide."
"Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied."
"The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man-and he asks no other man to exist for him."
"If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years."
"I think that people ran out of oxygen and don't really know what happened up there, maybe some of them just made things up because they weren't sure what had happened."
"Each university should have a Young Scholars' Committee. I became the chairman of this Committee, and immediately it was permitted to have this plan officially adopted."
"An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures."
"There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends."
"The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that."
"We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes."
"She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear-fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met... She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion-to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt."
"The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic."
"This box is useless," said Alliance 6-7349.Should it be what they claim of it," said Harmony 9-2642, "then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles."
"A pas de deux is a dialogue of love. How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb?"
"Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology."
"At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features."
"There is a state that is able to understand the demand in the economy. That state should use prices as an instrument for implementation of this understanding."
"The democratic choice Russian people made in the early 90's is final."
"It made a big difference to my match stamina. I couldn't imagine I would have been so energetic during the match - it really gave me a welcomed extra boost!"
"Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales."
"I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril."
"The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience."
"Today, a skilled manager makes more than the owner. And owners fight each other to get the skilled managers."
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