top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Russian Authors
"Your journey never ends. Life has a way of changing things in incredible ways."
"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man."
"Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds."
"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."
"I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever."
"The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor."
"I think that tennis is a lady's sport, so we should look out there like ladies."
"People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.' 'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind."
"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."
"Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn."
"You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better."
"He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton."
"Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew."
"I learned there's a big difference between juniors and the pros."
"Napoleon is a torrent which as yet we are unable to stem. Moscow will be the sponge that will suck him dry."
"For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources."
"I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought."
"If Russia rises, it means that the USA falls down."
"Bill Gates finds people in Russia to hire them to Microsoft. That's the Russian interest in this process."
"Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives."
"The red directors were one of the main political forces. Another force was the former Soviet ministers who lost everything because of the transformation of the Soviet Union to Russia."
"We'll limit in all ways the work of religious faiths which are foreign to us."
"We have arrived at an intellectual chaos."
"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?"
"Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it."
"Russia is an Eastern Orthodox country."
"If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them."
"Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot."
"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."
"The most all penetrating spirit before which will open the possibility of tilting not tables, but planets, is the spirit of free human inquiry. Believe only in that."
"If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes."
"I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well."
"I am sure that, on the one hand, the Rothschilds appreciate the merits of Marx, and that on the other hand, Marx feels an instinctive inclination and a great respect for the Rothschilds."
"You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know."
bottom of page