Quote

A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?

Ivan Turgenev

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Ivan Turgenev
Age: 65 †
Born: 1818
Born: January 1
Died: 1883
Died: January 1
Dramaturge
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Orel
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
Like
Falling
Leafs
Ground
Leaf
Creatures
Branch
Movement
Movements
Gayest
Strange
Butterfly
Maple
Fall
Vital
Withered
Left
Branches
Resemble
Things
Flight
Saddest

More quotes by Ivan Turgenev

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Great God, grant that twice two be not four.
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I do not know what the heart of a bad man is like. But i do know what the heart of a good man is like. And it is terrible.
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Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn't extinguished, as long as death doesn't lose its rights.
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That's what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.
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All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.
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What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?
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No matter how often you knock at nature's door, she won't answer in words you can understand--for Nature is dumb. She'll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you mustn't expect a song.
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Illness isn't the only thing that spoils the appetite.
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Don't force me into saying what I don't want to say, and what I won't say.
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Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us only at the beginning, when we're absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.
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Go and try to disprove death. Death will disprove you, and that's all!
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Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.
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In my case there was no first love. I began with the second.
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I only know that I feel tired, antiquated I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.
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Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel
Ivan Turgenev
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Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.
Ivan Turgenev
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I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.
Ivan Turgenev
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Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.
Ivan Turgenev
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What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
Ivan Turgenev
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What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.
Ivan Turgenev