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Quotes by Russian Authors
"I worked very hard and I earned all the attention I'm getting."
"Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it."
"A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron."
"There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it."
"All great literature is one of two stories, a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."
"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"
"Mento mori-remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?"
"They say: misfortunes, sufferings...well, if someone said to me right now, this minute: do you want to remain the way you were before captivity, or live through it all over again? For God's sake, captivity again and horsemeat! Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it's only here that the new and the good begins. As long as there's life, there's happiness. There's much, much still to come."
"I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms."
"Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary."
"Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy."
"We may have forgotten how to feel. Nobody is teaching us how to live happily ever after, as we've heard in fairy tales."
"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."
"I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between."
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press."
"Once you've been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is."
"If you live among dogs, keep a stick. After all, this is what a hound has teeth for-to bite when he feels like it!"
"You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings."
"As was to be expected, the discovery of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands immediately impelled physiologists to seek a similar apparatus in other glands lying deeper in the digestive canal."
"Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability."
"Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man - Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?"
"For God's sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch."
"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man."
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other."
"Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains."
"Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn."
"Pleasures flit by - they are only for yourself; work leaves a mark of long-lasting joy, work is for others."
"Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
"The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God."
"We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it."
"The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness."
"Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve."
"Everybody laughs the same in every language because laughter is a universal connection."
"Edible substances evoke the secretion of thick, concentrated saliva. Why? The answer, obviously, is that this enables the mass of food to pass smoothly through the tube leading from the mouth into the stomach."
"They're thinking of turning the peasant into an educated man. Why, first of all they should make him a good and prosperous farmer and then he'll learn all that is necessary for him to know."
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