Russian Literature Quotes

I am alone, but not everyone will die alone. Some will be surrounded by others, but I will be alone.

We create our own prisons, and live in them

My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is in these books.

If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

We live, not feeling the country beneath us

We grow old unconsciously, just as we become wise unconsciously

The more one remembers the past, the greater the sorrow; the less one remembers, the greater the foolishness

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for

I wanted movements, not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger, and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love

If you want to be happy, be

Human nature is everywhere the same, but in Russia it takes on a particularly grand and suffering aspect

To love life is to love its contradictions

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life

Every forest bird sings in its own voice, but the forest is made of all those voices together

One must learn to love life as it is, not as one wishes it to be

To pursue truth is the most unrelenting passion, and it is both a Russian curse and a Russian salvation

The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge

To live is the rarest thing in the world; most people exist, that is all

If you want to do good, first have the courage to see evil

A novel is a mirror journeying down the road

I long to speak the most important words, but I am mute

A writer is dear and sacred because he reveals the world to people and people to the world

In a man’s life, there should be moments of peace, moments when the soul touches infinity

To understand, you must listen with your soul, not just your ears

Art is the means by which humanity experiences itself

To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all.

Happy people build their lives with the sense of novelty and change

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master

To love someone means to see them as God intended them

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how

All is still and calm… but in the heart of man there is always a storm

The more personal, the more universal

A man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides

The soul is healed by being with children

To be too conscious is an illness. A real thorough-going illness

I am a poet. That’s what makes me interesting. If I were an ordinary man, I should not be interesting.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

You ask: what is life? That is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more splendid.

Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: the gift of seeing what others have not seen

Man is what he reads

To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract

Everything flowed, everything changed, we are not the same as we were yesterday

Beauty will save the world

The world is, of course, nothing but our own perception of it. But to guess at a living soul behind every face remains the Russian writer’s sacred duty.

You will not attain true wisdom without having first suffered

It is better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre

You can be sincere and still be stupid

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

When the heart speaks, reason finds it indecent to object

Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy; only because of that. That’s all, that’s all!

We are punished by our sins, not for them

The living soul demands to live; this is not logic, but necessity

A tree is known by its fruit, and a man by his deeds

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others

Work, search for peace and calm in work: you will find it nowhere else

Every person is a mystery, and the deeper you look, the more incomprehensible he becomes.

You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again

To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others

The gift for seeing what others do not see is both the curse and the salvation of the writer

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's

The strongest of all warriors are these two—Time and Patience

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given

I want to understand, and that is why I eliminate everything that hinders understanding; that is why I devote myself wholeheartedly to art, for art is the only means by which we can escape from ourselves and know another's view of the universe

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow

Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy; only because of that

If there is no immortality, there is no virtue

Literature is not a mirror of society, but its hammer: it molds, shapes, and sometimes cracks it open.

A word spoken is past recalling, and a stone once thrown cannot be retrieved

Write about sad things, but do not make the reader sad. That is art

Man is what he believes

Our greatest freedom is the freedom to change ourselves

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth

The Russian soul is a painful burden, but without it, Russia would not be Russia

Our feelings are not in our own power, they are always born of circumstances, as thoughts are born in the mind.

Woe to the man who has not learned in his youth to hope, to love – and to put his trust in life!

In Russia, all paths lead to the tavern; but from the tavern, all roads diverge

Don't distort your vision of the world, merely observe it

In the end the world will be saved by beauty, not by reason or by force, but by the anxious efforts of the heart

There are things man does not ask out of pride, and which he does not concede out of pride

Words are deeds

We all came out from under Gogol’s 'Overcoat'

To love life is to love its contradictions.

You must love life more than the meaning of life

What is important is not a particular thing, but the movement of thought itself

The written word remains incomparably powerful; it is the solution for loneliness, the quiet answer to despair

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer

History would be a wonderful thing – if only it were true.

There are books which make you think, others that make you dream, and then there are Russian books—the ones that do both while making you ache deeply

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people

Habit is a great deadener

In every man’s life comes the hour of great loneliness

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

A man who finds true freedom in Russia is either a madman or a genius.

All my life, I have been tormented by longing for another world, a world that is pure and serene.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

We need new forms, new forms are necessary, and if you can’t create them, then there is no point in writing.

Everything I know, I know because of love

We have learned much, but we have not learned happiness

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness

There are moments, you reach moments, and time stands still. It becomes divine.

All the most powerful love stories are stories of separation

I despise that which is easy and safe; I seek that which is difficult, that which requires sacrifice and suffering—such is the Russian soul

Whoever has a why to live for can bear almost any how

Talent is nothing but courage in the face of the impossible.

To live without hope is to cease to live

One must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star

Take a look at any place of suffering or sorrow. There the Russian heart is opened wider than any other

But who, if not writers, will say what needs to be said, will call things by their right name?

Take up an idea, devote yourself to it, struggle on in patience, and the sun will rise for you.

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible

She even learnt to look upon the world as a vast cemetery, where each lived wrapped in his own shroud, and was charmed by the thought

People speak sometimes about the 'bestial' cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel

We are asleep until we fall in love

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself

In Russia, the only way to escape from reality is to drink or to write

Russia has always had too much truth. That is why she is always intoxicated with it

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing cannot be an artist

Man is made for happiness, and anyone who is completely happy has the right to say to himself: ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’

There is nothing easier than denouncing the evildoer; nothing more difficult than understanding him

When reason fails, the devil helps

Through the smoke of the samovar and the frost of the window, I glimpse eternity in the steaming tea

I ask myself: 'What is life?' And I answer: 'An infinite variety of combinations of pain and pleasure.'

Man is what he reads

Everything in life that’s beautiful, everything that brings us to tears or laughter, happens because someone has found a way to put a little of themselves in it

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love

But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like the chess player, he is interested in the process of the game, rather than in the result itself

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him

On the whole, Russia wants one thing: absorbing suffering, quietly, stubbornly, with a certain satisfaction, loving its own sadness as a sign of genuine life

Rebellion is a sacred thing; it’s the beginning of thought.

He was afraid of becoming himself, of uncovering his own face; his secret, which he guarded and kept hidden from all his comrades, was that he was afraid of himself

Write! Write! When the pen moves, the soul awakens.

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, even if in Russia you can rarely see them for the clouds

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the process loses his soul.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Everything you can imagine is real.

To be conscious is to suffer

All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope

But how can one live and have no story to tell

In our hearts, we are all exiles longing for a home we may never find

The snow fell softly, covering the world as if to forgive it its faults

The deeper the sorrow, the closer is the heart to understanding

We will write so that we will leave behind us a memory which will not die