Top 180 Ivan Turgenev Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Strange things happen on this earth: you can live a long while with someone and be on the friendliest of terms, and yet you’ll never once talk openly with him, from the depths of your soul; while with someone else you may scarcely have met, at one glance, whether you to him or he to you, just as in a confessional, you’ll blurt out the story of your life.”

— Ivan Turgenev

102. “Go and try to disprove death. Death will disprove you, and that’s all!”

— Ivan Turgenev

103. “Know how to will, and you will be free, and will lead.”

— Ivan Turgenev

104. “Anyone who has crossed from the district of Bolkhov into that of Zhizdra will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the provinces of Orel and Kaluga.”

— Ivan Turgenev

105. “I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to acknowledge to myself that I was not loved;.”

— Ivan Turgenev

106. “Thank you for the offer, Anna Sergeyevna, and for your flattering opinion of my conversational talents. But I find even now I’ve spent too long in a world alien to me. Flying fish can stay a while in the air but they soon have to flop down into the water. Let me splash back into my element.”

— Ivan Turgenev

107. “Why is it that even when we are enjoying music, for example, or a fine evening or conversation with people we like, why does it all seem to be a hint of some limitless happiness existing somewhere else rather than a real happiness, the kind, that is, we possess ourselves?”

— Ivan Turgenev

108. “Every single man hangs by a thread, a bottomless pit can open beneath him any minute, and yet he still goes on thinking up unpleasantnesses for himself and making a mess of his life.”

— Ivan Turgenev

109. “Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there’ll come a time when you’ll start asking just for a crust.”

— Ivan Turgenev

110. “He has no faith in principles, only in frogs.”

— Ivan Turgenev

111. “You may feed the wolf as you will; he has always a hankering for the woods.”

— Ivan Turgenev

112. “Oh we have hard times to live through, those of us who are born spectators.”

— Ivan Turgenev

113. “Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”

— Ivan Turgenev

114. “Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he’s something innately superior, something eternal – and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.”

— Ivan Turgenev

115. “A nihilist is a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.”

— Ivan Turgenev

116. “My dear Natalya Petrovna, there’s funny and funny.”

— Ivan Turgenev

117. “It’s amazing how man still believes in words. For example, if you call him a fool and don’t beat him, he’ll be wretched. Call him a genius and don’t give him any money – he’ll be quite satisfied.”

— Ivan Turgenev

118. “The “why not” of youth, the secret desire to know his luck, to try his strength all on his own without the support of another, eventually won through.”

— Ivan Turgenev

119. “What’s the point of talking and thinking about the future which for the most part doesn’t depend on us? If the opportunity arises to do something-great, and if it doesn’t at least you’ll be glad you didn’t chatter about it beforehand.”

— Ivan Turgenev

120. “In reality you felt at the same time that he could not be friends, nor be really intimate with anyone, and that he could not be so, not because in general he was independent of other people, but because his whole being was for a time turned inwards upon himself.”

— Ivan Turgenev

121. “The man who has not seen such tears in the eyes of his beloved does not know the height of happiness to which, with mingled joy and gratitude and modesty, a woman can attain.”

— Ivan Turgenev

122. “Toda mi vida ha sido una espera del inevitable encuentro contigo.”

— Ivan Turgenev

123. “I never started from ideas but always from character.”

— Ivan Turgenev

124. “I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.”

— Ivan Turgenev

125. “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 as one starts doing it one gets worn out and tired.”

— Ivan Turgenev

126. “A man’s capable of understanding anything – how the ether vibrates, and what’s going on in the sun – but how any other man can blow his nose differently from him, that he’s incapable of understanding.”

— Ivan Turgenev

127. “Death is something ancient, but it comes fresh to each of us.”

— Ivan Turgenev

128. “I’ve become convinced that every person should treat himself strictly and even rudely and distrustfully; it’s difficult to tame the beast in oneself.”

— Ivan Turgenev

129. “Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Glafira Petrovna’s estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it.”

— Ivan Turgenev

130. “I assure you, Alexandra Pavlovna,′ said Pigasov slowly, ’nothing can be worse and more injurious than good-fortune that comes too late. It cannot give you pleasure in any way, and it deprives you of the right – the precious right – of complaining and cursing Providence. Yes, madam, it’s a cruel and insulting trick – belated fortune.”

— Ivan Turgenev

131. “There are none so easily carried away as those who are without passion.”

— Ivan Turgenev

132. “His little eyes, which looked as if they’d literally been hammered into place, gazed out fixedly and uncomfortably, and he also had a way of laughing uncomfortably with an abrupt, wooden laugh.”

— Ivan Turgenev

133. “Words indeed have been my ruin; they have consumed me, and to the end I cannot be free of them.”

— Ivan Turgenev

134. “I gave myself up to fruitless speculation, and was always looking for secluded places. I became particularly fond of the ruined greenhouse. I used to climb, I remember, on to the high wall, settle myself on it and sit there, a youth afflicted by such misery, solitude and grief that I would be overcome with self-pity. How I reveled in these melancholy feelings – how I adored them.”

— Ivan Turgenev

135. “This is the only thing that makes life worth living. If you have succeeded in doing something you wanted to do, something that seemed impossible – well, then, make the most of it, with all your heart, to the very brim.”

— Ivan Turgenev

136. “As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there’s no point in waiting for so-called blissful moments, for inspiration; if it comes, so much the better – but you keep working anyway.”

— Ivan Turgenev

137. “She found it sinful and expensive to have sugar in her tea, although she herself never spent a penny on anything.”

— Ivan Turgenev

138. “Her whole life had been passed in the bitter struggle with daily want; she had known no joy, had not tasted the honey of happiness.”

— Ivan Turgenev

139. “I believe that the reason why Dimitri’s soul is so clear, is that he is entirely given up to his work, his ideal. What has he to trouble about? When any one has utterly... utterly... given himself up, he has little sorrow, he is not responsible for anything. It’ s not I want, but it wants.”

— Ivan Turgenev

140. “Those were Anna Sergeyevna’s words, and those were Bazarovs; both thought they spoke the truth. Did their words hold the truth, the whole truth? They didn’t know it themselves, much less does the author. But their conversation went as if they completely believed one another.”

— Ivan Turgenev

141. “Woe to the heart that has not loved in youth!”

— Ivan Turgenev

142. “Significance is sweet...”

— Ivan Turgenev

143. “A son should never be a judge of his father, especially I of such a father as you, who’ve never in any way put any constraints on my freedom.”

— Ivan Turgenev

144. “Illness isn’t the only thing that spoils the appetite.”

— Ivan Turgenev

145. “To be young and not to know how, is bearable; to be old and not have the strength, is too great a weight to carry. And what’s is so painful you can’t sense your powers leaving you. It’s hard for an old man to ensure such blows!”

— Ivan Turgenev

146. “Sentimental outbreaks are like liquorice; when first you suck it, it’s not bad, but afterwards it leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.”

— Ivan Turgenev

147. “And yet can it be that I was fit for nothing, that for me there was, as it were, no work on earth to do?”

— Ivan Turgenev

148. “In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: ‘The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a whole race,’ because ‘a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth.’ Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was ’an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master.”

— Ivan Turgenev

149. “Both men felt uncomfortable. Each knew the other understood him. That kind of knowledge is agreeable for friends, and for enemies very disagreeable, especially when they can’t either have it out or separate.”

— Ivan Turgenev

150. “The misfortune of solitary and timid people – who are timid from self-consciousness – is just that, though they have eyes and indeed open them wide, they see nothing, or see everything in a false light, as though through coloured spectacles.”

— Ivan Turgenev