Russian Author Quotes

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Leo Tolstoy

Anton Chekhov

Alexander Pushkin

Vladimir Nabokov

Ivan Turgenev

Anna Akhmatova

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it's like a dream.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life... within a given age in a given society... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal... they are good; if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.

My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

Alexander Pushkin

If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.

Hell and damnation,
life is such fun
with a ragged greatcoat
and a Jerry gun!

Oh, what a marvelous affirmation of evolutionary theory! Oh, what a great chain extends from a dog to Mendeleev the chemist!

Mikhail Bulgakov

Who will ride fiery, ahead of the legions,
Nag for a steed, and crusts for meal,
Temper his sword in the heat and in ice storms,
Sleep on straw pallets, labor 'til dawn,
Bring down the armies, the walls and the forts
With but a handful of stout Russian men?

Gavrila Derzhavin

My mother, who disliked me from the bottom of her heart, deliberately did everything, it seemed, that would strengthen and intensify my unbounded passion for freedom and a military life. She wouldn't let me walk in the garden. She wouldn't let me be away from her for even half an hour: I had to sit in her bedroom and make lace. She herself taught me to sew, to knit, and seeing that I had neither the desire nor the ability for this sort of work, that in my hands everything tore or broke, she became angry, lost control of herself, and beat me very painfully on the hands.

Nadezhda Durova

Humanity has no force more powerful and victorious than science.

Our habit of constantly and zealously answering to any rabble has already done us a lot of harm and will do much more. … We do not have to apologize for anything. We are a people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better than the rest. As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them. … We do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody's examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky

The age is rocking the wave
with human grief
to a golden beat, and an adder
is breathing in time with it in the grass.

Osip Mandelstam

Our planet
is poorly equipped
for delight.
One must snatch
gladness
from the days that are.
In this life
it's not difficult to die.
To make life
is more difficult by far.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise; And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.

Vladimir Nabokov

Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

Boris Pasternak

Here come the Slavophiles and Nihilists, and none of them have clean fingernails.

One may speak about anything on earth with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but one only speaks about oneself with avidity.

There are no more fortunate and happy people than those who live according to the correct, eternal laws of the multiplication table.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

'The Don! The Don! The gentle Don! Our father; giver of our food! Hurrah!'

Mikhail Sholokhov

Science, in the best sense of the word, shall come to be accessible to the people, and when it does it shall claim a voice in all practical matters.

Alexander Herzen

They carried him not to bury him:
They carried him down to crown him....
The poet flourished here, disheveled,
Who would not bow before votive lamps But to the common spade.

Andrei Voznesensky

Our freedom is but a light that breaks through from another world.

Nikolai Gumilev

God of frostbite, God of famine,
beggars, cripples by the yard,
farms with no crops to examine—
that's him, that's your Russian God.

Peter Vyazemsky

It's always the good feel rotten.
Pleasure's for those who are bad.