Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— 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…

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— 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…

— 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…

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

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

— Ivan Turgenev

Great God, grant that twice two be not four.

— 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

“Poetry is the language of the gods. I love poems myself. But poetry is not only in poems; it is diffused everywhere,…

— Ivan Turgenev

I do not know what the heart of a bad man is like. But i do know what the heart of a…

— Ivan Turgenev

I was as happy as a fish in water, and I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left…

— Ivan Turgenev

Looking about me, listening and recalling what the day had been like, I suddenly felt a secret unease in my heart and…

— Ivan Turgenev

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice…

— Ivan Turgenev

Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we're absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in…

— Ivan Turgenev

“Good-bye,' he said with sudden force, and his eyes gleamed with their last light. 'Good-bye.... Listen ... you know I didn't kiss…

— Ivan Turgenev

“...pe atunci traiam fara grija, faceam ce voiam, infloream, intr-un cuvant. Pe atunci nu-mi trecea prin cap ca omul nu e o…

— Ivan Turgenev

I only know that I feel tired, antiquated; I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.

— Ivan Turgenev

I'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have…

— Ivan Turgenev