“The saddest instance of the lack of real freedom, arising from the lack of real knowledge, is revealed to us in Leo Tolstoy's latest work, a work which at the same time, by virtue of its creative, poetic force, ranks… — Ivan Turgenev Copy Share Image
I'm through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me… If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa. — Ivan Turgenev Copy Share Image
What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table. — Ivan Turgenev Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do. — Ivan Turgenev Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“My son,' he wrote to me, 'fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison…” — Ivan Turgenev Copy Share Image
What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite. — Ivan Turgenev Copy Share Image
