Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev's novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turg...enev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his--that character's--absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist's dummy of the socialistic type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr.... Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a... constant submission to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past... childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life deceives everyone except the individual who doesn't contemplate it, the individual who demands nothing from it, the individua...l who serenely accepts its few gifts and serenely makes the most of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go forward while you can, but if your strength fails you, sit down near the road and gaze without anger or envy at those who pass ...by. They don't have far to go, either.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love isn't actually a feeling at all--it's an illness, a certain condition of body and soul.... Usually it takes possession of som...eone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will--just like cholera or a fever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »