Top 180 Ivan Turgenev Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Mad people all live a long time – you know, every grief has its good side.”

— Ivan Turgenev

152. “Oh, Arkady, do me a favour, do let us for once have a really good quarrel – no holds barred, to the death.” “But if we do, it’ll end in... ” “Blows?” Bazarov continued. “What if it does? Here, in the hay, in these idyllic surroundings, far from the world and the eyes of men – it doesn’t matter. But you won’t beat me. I’m going to take you now by the throat...”

— Ivan Turgenev

153. “My first love, certainly, was not quite an ordinary one.”

— Ivan Turgenev

154. “For nature had denied him a gift for music as it had denied him a gift for everything else.”

— Ivan Turgenev

155. “However, I know myself as a very unhappy person.”

— Ivan Turgenev

156. “Eten, drinken en weten dat je niet juister en verstandiger kunt handelen. Maar nee, de verveling wordt je te machtig. Je wilt mensen hebben, al was het maar om ze uit te schelden, maar je wilt mensen hebben.”

— Ivan Turgenev

157. “Her presence seared me like a flame... but what did I care what kind of fire this was in which I burned and melted, when it was bliss to burn and melt?”

— Ivan Turgenev

158. “In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend’s suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!”

— Ivan Turgenev

159. “Both were silent, but the very way in which they were silent, in which they were sitting together, was expressive of confidential intimacy; each of them seemed not even to be thinking of his companion, while secretly rejoicing in his presence.”

— Ivan Turgenev

160. “Goed is het waar wij niet zijn.”

— Ivan Turgenev

161. “There was a time when I used to say: ‘I will do many things in life, and refuse to die before I have completed those tasks, for I am a giant.’: but now I have indeed a giant’s task in hand- the task of dying as though death were nothing to me.”

— Ivan Turgenev

162. “And I have burnt all I adored And now adore all that I burnt.” As he uttered the two last lines, Mihalevitch.”

— Ivan Turgenev

163. “But you have brought me yourself,... and that is the best bringing of all.”

— Ivan Turgenev

164. “Pretty little feet,′ she thought as she slowly and lightly mounted the stone steps of the terrace which were scorching in the sun. ‘Pretty little feet, you say... Well, before long he shall be kneeling at them.”

— Ivan Turgenev

165. “They had much discussion upon the question whether marriage was a prejudice or a crime, and whether men were born equal or not, and precisely what individuality consists in. Things.”

— Ivan Turgenev

166. “In ieder geval zal het bij een juiste inrichting van der maatschappij geen enkel verschil maken of iemand dom of verstandig, slecht of goed is.”

— Ivan Turgenev

167. “There were Hegelians, now there are only nihilists.”

— Ivan Turgenev

168. “What was she? A dream? A fairy-tale?”

— Ivan Turgenev

169. “I should not wish ever to have it repeated; but I should consider myself unhappy if I had never experienced it.”

— Ivan Turgenev

170. “By the way, since I mentioned the word happiness... Tell me, why is it that when we are enjoying something, music for instance, a fine evening, conversation with people who are sympathetic to us; why is it that all this seems to be a foretaste of some joy without measure which exists somewhere apart and beyond, rather than real happiness, that is a happiness which is actually within our grasp? Why should this be? Or are you, perhaps, not visited by such feelings?”

— Ivan Turgenev

171. “Like all women who have not succeeded in loving, she wanted something, without herself knowing what. Strictly speaking, she wanted nothing; but it seemed to her that she wanted everything.”

— Ivan Turgenev

172. “She was frightened of him – his manner was severely cold and aloof... I have never seen anymore more exquisitely calm, more self-assured or more imperious.”

— Ivan Turgenev

173. “Arkady went on with the look of a man who has gone into a swamp and feels that with every step he is sinking deeper and deeper and still hurries on, in the hope of extricating himself sooner.”

— Ivan Turgenev

174. “What can we do, Vasya! Our son’s his own master now. He’s like a free bird of the skies: he wanted to come – came flying down to us; wanted to go – and flew away. And you and I, the mushrooms in a hollow, sit here side by side and can’t fly after him. Only I’ll stay by you and be the same for ever, as you will do for me.”

— Ivan Turgenev

175. “A lesson to you, young man. And the whole thing arises from not knowing how to say good-bye,-to break bonds in time. You now, seem to have jumped out successfully. Look out, don’t fall in again. Farewell.”

— Ivan Turgenev

176. “Turgenev tended to believe that man is never destined to experience happiness save as something ephemeral and inevitably foredoomed.”

— Ivan Turgenev

177. “Jealous Othello, ready for murder, was suddenly transformed into a schoolboy.”

— Ivan Turgenev

178. “Maybe you’re right; maybe it’s true that every person is a puzzle.”

— Ivan Turgenev

179. “It is sweet to be the sole source, the arbitrary and irresponsible source of the greatest joys and profoundest miseries to someone else.”

— Ivan Turgenev

180. “It seemed to me both that I had known her for a long time and that I had known nothing and had not lived before she came.”

— Ivan Turgenev

181. “That the heart cannot choose but love,′ repeated Zinaida. ‘That’s where poetry’s so fine; it tells us what is not, what’s not only better than what is, but much more like the truth, “cannot choose but love,” – it might want not to, but it can’t help it.”

— Ivan Turgenev

182. “But what did I want to say to you? That I loved you? There was a time when the phrase ‘I love’ had for me no meaning; and now it will have less than ever, seeing that love is a form, and that my particular embodiment of it is fast lapsing towards dissolution.”

— Ivan Turgenev

183. “While she was exchanging the simplest sentences with him, even while she was jesting with him, she was conscious of a faint spasm of dread. So people on a steamer at sea talk and laugh carelessly, for all the world as though they were on dry land; but let only the slightest hitch occur, let the least sign be seen of anything out of the common, and at once on every face there comes out an expression of peculiar alarm, betraying the constant consciousness of constant danger.”

— Ivan Turgenev

184. “We’ll meet again, won’t we?’ ‘As you wish,’ answered Bazarov. ‘In that case we will.”

— Ivan Turgenev

185. “It’s not for man nor beast to get the better of death. Death doesn’t come running, but you can’t run away from it, neither; nor must you be helping it along.”

— Ivan Turgenev

186. “Like a beetle tied by the leg, I hovered incessantly around the beloved wing; I believe I would have liked to remain there forever... but that was impossible.”

— Ivan Turgenev

187. “My passion amused her. She made fun of me, played with me, and tormented me. It is sweet to be the sole source, the arbitrary and irresponsible source of the greatest joys and profoundest miseries to someone else.”

— Ivan Turgenev

188. “For a man may understand the precipitation of ether, and be au fait with what is taking place in the sun, yet, confront him with the fact that another man blows his nose differently from the manner in which he blows his own, and at once that man will become lost in perplexity.”

— Ivan Turgenev

189. “Here, in the cool shade, she read and worked, or surrendered herself to that sensation of perfect peace with which we are all presumably familiar and whose charm lies in a barely conscious and silent observation of the sweeping wave of life that for ever rolls all round us as well as within us.”

— Ivan Turgenev

190. “You see what a hideous spectacle; the worm half-crushed but writhing still. And, you see, I thought too: I’d break down so many things, I wouldn’t die, why should I! There were problems to be solved, and I was a giant! And now all the problem for the giant is how to die decently.”

— Ivan Turgenev

191. “In losing his past, he lost everything.”

— Ivan Turgenev

192. “That impenetrable darkness exudes iron chill, and over the iron breath a hesitant, dark voice can be heard from the depth of the building; “You who long to step over this threshold, do you know what awaits you?”

— Ivan Turgenev

193. “The Bacchantes have surrounded her, and whirled her off into the night, into the dark. Here you must paint the swirling clouds of smoke and everything in chaos. Only their cries can be heard, and her wreath is left lying on the bank.”

— Ivan Turgenev