Quotes by Ivan Turgenev

“Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel”

“Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.”

“... if we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”

“Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.”

“Women... cant live with em... cant shoot em.”

“However much you knock at natures door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.”

“Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this—Great God, grant that twice two be not four.”

“I share no mans opinions; I have my own”

“To mortify and even to injure an opponent, reproach him with the very defect or vice you feel in yourself”

“The temerity to believe in nothing”

“Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.”

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

We’re young, we’re not monsters, no fools: we’ll conquer happiness for ourselves.

It’s strange how things happen in life: you live with someone for a long time, you are on the best of terms, yet you never once speak to them frankly and from the heart; with someone else, you’ve hardly even got acquainted - and there you are: as if at confession, one or other of you is blurting out all his most intimate secrets.

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.

Thats what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.

The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.

I want everything or nothing. A life for a life, taking one and giving up another without hesitation and beyond recall. Or else better have nothing!

Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Glafira Petrovnas estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it.

Can it be thattheir prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love,sacred devoted love, is not all powerful? Oh, no! Howeverpassionate, sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, theflowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes;they tell us not only of eternal peace, of that great peace ofindifferent nature; they tell us also of eternal reconciliation andof life without end.