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Take what you can yourself, and don't let others get you into their hands to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.

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
Life
Belong
Oneself
Others
Hands
Take
Whole
Thing

More quotes by Ivan Turgenev

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Looking about me, listening and recalling what the day had been like, I suddenly felt a secret unease in my heart and raised my eyes to the sky, but even in the sky there seemed to be no tranquillity. Dotted with stars, it constantly quivered and danced and shivered.
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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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 banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.
Ivan Turgenev
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I was afraid of looking into my heart...afraid of thinking seriously about anything...I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved.
Ivan Turgenev
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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?
Ivan Turgenev
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I only know that I feel tired, antiquated I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.
Ivan Turgenev
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Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.
Ivan Turgenev
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The temerity to believe in nothing.
Ivan Turgenev
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What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.
Ivan Turgenev
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Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself.
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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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.
Ivan Turgenev
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Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?
Ivan Turgenev
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What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.
Ivan Turgenev
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We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars.
Ivan Turgenev
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Even nightingales can’t be fed on fairy tales.
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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There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.
Ivan Turgenev
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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.
Ivan Turgenev
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I share no man's opinions I have my own.
Ivan Turgenev