Familiar Quotations

If one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one
might wish them to be.
~ Lev Tolstoi, Russian writer (1828 - 1910)


In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
~Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-) Russian poet.


They decided to suffocate me in 1965...You Westerners
cannot imagine my situation. I live in my own country. I
write a novel about Russia. But as hard for me to gather
material as it would be if I were writing about Polynesia...
A kind of forbidden, contaminated zone has been created
around my family... The plan is either to drive me out of
my life, or out of the country, to throw me into a ditch or
to send me to Siberia, or to have me dissolve in an alien
fog.
~ Aleksandyr Solzhenitsyn 


It is not the little books that are dangerous, but that there
 is nothing for us to eat. 
~ Peasant village elder, 1903. (Wren and Stults, The Course of Russian History.)


You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves. 
~ Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) Russian political leader.


The future is assured. It's just the past that keeps changing 
~ Russian joke. 


Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that 
lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill 
you too. 
~ Anton Chekhov 


If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry. 
~ Anton Chekhov 


If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)


Russia vomited out the abomination that they were feeding it.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky. 


Russia is like a dinosaur. A lot of time is needed for change to 
reach the tail from the head.
~ Alexander Lebed, Trud, 1995. 


It is a property of the Russian people to indulge in philosophy. 
...[but] the fate of the philosopher in Russia is painful and tragic. 
~ Nikolai Berdyaev.


The Russian Idea  ... everything on earth is just waiting to merge with truth,
just as moonlight merges with night.
~ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian writer. (1860 - 1904).


Man is what he believes.
~ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian writer. (1860 - 1904).


from interviews with Anton Chekhov:
"My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of
selecting the important moments from the trivial ones....It'
s about time for writers ~ particularly those who are
genuine artists ~ to recognize that in this world you
cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the
crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does
not understand everything, and that lone will represent a
major contribution to the way people think, a long leap
forward." (May, 1888) "No psychologist should pretend to
understand what he does not understand....Only fools and
charlatans know everything and understand nothing." 
(June,1888)
~ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian writer. (1860 - 1904).


Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living
that wears you out. 
~ Anton Chekhov


The whole of Russia is our orchard ... we shall plant a
new orchard that will be more splendid than this one.
~ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian writer. (1860 - 1904).


Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but
once, and he must live it so as feel no torturing regrets
for wasted years, never know the burning shame of mean and
petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life,
all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the
world - the fight for the Liberation of Mankind.
~ Nikolai Ostrovsky, Russian writer (1904 - 1936).


There are plays written on the simplest themes which in
themselves are not interesting. But they are permeated by
the eternal and he who feels this quality in them perceives
that they are feels this quality in them perceives that
they are written for all eternity.
~ Constantin Stanislavsky, (1863 - 1938) / My Life in Art.


All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.
~ Lev Tolstoi, Russian writer (1828 - 1910) / Anna Karenina.


Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and
complete joy. 
~ Lev Tolstoi, Russian writer (1828 - 1910) / War and Peace


Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of
infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.
~ John Ruskin


...in order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that
he should not only be capable of his work, but a good
judge of his work.
~ John Ruskin


John Ruskin was born on 8. February 1819. He was the
greatest British art critic and social commentator of the
Victorian Age. His ideas inspired the Arts and Crafts
Movement and the founding of the National Trust, the
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the
Labor Movement. 
Russian writer Tolstoy introducing Ruskin's works, wrote:
"John Ruskin is one of those rare men who think with their
hearts, and so he thinks and says what he was himself seen
and felt, and what everyone will think and say in the
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