Goed is het waar wij niet zijn.

What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.

— Ivan Turgenev

Great God, grant that twice two be not four.

— Ivan Turgenev

“My son,' he wrote to me, 'fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison…”

— Ivan Turgenev

“But I had absolutely lost all sense of personal dignity, and could not tear myself away from the spectacle of my own misery.”

— Ivan Turgenev

There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person--it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface…

— Ivan Turgenev

Love isn't actually a feeling at all--it's an illness, a certain condition of body and soul… Usually it takes possession of someone without his…

— Ivan Turgenev

“In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest…

— Ivan Turgenev

“There was nothing ugly in the small, unprepossessing figure of this emancipated woman, but the expression on her face made a bad impression on…

— Ivan Turgenev

“But I think that I have already been moving too long in a sphere which is not my own. Flying fishes can hold out…

— Ivan Turgenev

The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?

— Ivan Turgenev

Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

— Ivan Turgenev

So long as one's just dreaming about what to do, one can soar like an eagle and move mountains, it seems, but as soon…

— Ivan Turgenev

That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but…

— Ivan Turgenev

“I think; here I lie under a haystack… The tiny space I occupy is so infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space,…

— Ivan Turgenev

What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.

— Ivan Turgenev