Ivan Turgenev Life Quotations

Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he's something innately superior, something eternal--and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.

Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.

What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.

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.

Life deceives everyone except the individual who doesn't contemplate it, the individual who demands nothing from it, the individual who serenely accepts its few gifts and serenely makes the most of them.

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.