Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.

— Ivan Turgenev

To be young and not to know how, is bearable; to be old and not have the strength, is too great a weight to carry. And what is so painful you can't sense your powers leaving you. It's hard for an old man to ensure such blows!

— Ivan Turgenev

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

— Ivan Turgenev

Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Graphic Petrov's estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it.

— Ivan Turgenev

Was coming to that troubled twilight time, a time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth is past, but old age has not yet come.

— Ivan Turgenev

Weak people never put an end to things themselves. They always wait for the end.

— Ivan Turgenev

We’re young, we’re not monsters, no fools: we’ll conquer happiness for ourselves.

— Ivan Turgenev

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

— Ivan Turgenev

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

— Ivan Turgenev

Woe to the heart that has not loved in youth!

— Ivan Turgenev