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@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“Habit is Heaven's own redress:
it takes the place of happiness.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 2, st. 31.

“Come purge my soul, Thou Master of my days,
Of vain and empty words, of idle ways,
Of base ambition and the urge to rule;
That hidden serpent that corrupts a fool;
and grant me, Lord, to see my sins alone.
That I not call my brother to atone;
Make chaste my heart and lend me from above
Thy fortitude, humility, and love.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

A Prayer
as quoted in Pushkin, Alexander (2009). Selected Lyric Poetry. Northwestern University Press, p. 199.

“"The bread of the stranger is bitter," says Dante, "and his staircase hard to climb." But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as the poor companion of an old lady of quality?”

Aleksandr Pushkin book The Queen of Spades

II.
The Queen of Spades (1833)

“Ah! heavy art thou, crown of Monomakh!”

Aleksandr Pushkin Boris Godunov

Boris Godunov (1825)

“Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book The Queen of Spades

VI.
The Queen of Spades (1833)

“Send me, Almighty, I petition,
In porticoes or at a ball
No bonneted academician,
No seminarist in a yellow shawl!
No more than in red lips unsmiling
Can I find anything beguiling
In grammar-perfect Russian speech.
What purist magazines beseech,
A novel breed of belles may heed it,
And bend us (for my life of sin)
To strict grammatic discipline,
Prescribing meter, too, where needed;
But I - what is all this to me?
I like things as they used to be”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 3, st. 28. (Translated by Walter Arndt in Eugene Onegin (2009). Penguin.

“Hermann went out of his mind, and is now confined in room Number 17 of the Obukhov Hospital. He never answers any questions, but he constantly mutters with unusual rapidity: "Three, seven, ace!"”

Aleksandr Pushkin book The Queen of Spades

"Three, seven, queen!"
VI.
The Queen of Spades (1833)

“When the loud day for men who sow and reap
Grows still, and on the silence of the town
The insubstantial veils of night and sleep,
The meed of the day's labour, settle down,
Then for me in the stillness of the night
The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
And in the idle darkness comes the bite
Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
And Memory before my wakeful eyes
With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
But cannot wash the woeful script away.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Remembrance.

“Love passed, the Muse appeared, the weather
of mind got clarity new-found;
now free, I once more weave together
emotion, thought, and magic sound.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 1, st. 59.

“The illness with which he'd been smitten
should have been analysed when caught,
something like spleen, that scourge of Britain,
or Russia's chondria, for short.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 1, st. 38.

“Sad that our finest aspiration
Our freshest dreams and meditations,
In swift succession should decay,
Like Autumn leaves that rot away.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Что наши лучшие желанья,
Что наши свежие мечтанья
Истлели быстрой чередой,
Как листья осенью гнилой.
Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 8, st. 11.

“God grant you, friends, a helping hand—
In cares of state and private plights,
In rowdy feasts of friendship's band,
In passion's sweet and secret rites!
God grant you, friends, a helping hand—
In daily woes and days of strife,
On vacant sa, in distant land,
In every black abyss of life!”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Pushkin, 19 October 1827.
as quoted in Pushkin, Alexander (2009). Selected Lyric Poetry. Northwestern University Press, p. 121.

“Mosalsky: Good folk! Maria Godunov and her son Feodor have poisoned themselves. We have seen their dead bodies. [The People are silent with horror. ] Why are ye silent? Cry, Long live the Tsar Dimitry Ivanovich! [The People are speechless. ]”

Aleksandr Pushkin Boris Godunov

Boris Godunov (1825)

“The heavy hanging chains shall fall,
The walls shall crumble at the word,
And Freedom greet you with the light
And brothers give you back the sword.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

The Decembrists

“The clock of doom had struck as fated;
the poet, without a sound,
let fall his pistol on the ground.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 6, st. 30.

“Always contented with his life,
and with his dinner, and his wife.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 1, st. 12.

“There yet remains but one concluding tale,
And then this chronicle of mine is ended—
Fulfilled, the duty God ordained to me,
A sinner. Not without purpose did the Lord
Put me to witness much for many years
And educate me in the love of books.
One day some indefatigable monk
Will find my conscientious, unsigned work;
Like me, he will light up his ikon-lamp
And, shaking from the scroll the age-old dust,
He will transcribe these tales in all their truth.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Prologue, sec. 5, l. 18-28.
Eugene Onegin (1823)

“I have come to you against my wish," she said in a firm voice: "but I have been ordered to grant your request. Three, seven, ace, will win for you if played in succession, but only on these conditions: that you do not play more than one card in twenty-four hours, and that you never play again during the rest of your life. I forgive you my death, on condition that you marry my companion, Lizaveta Ivanovna.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book The Queen of Spades

V.
The Queen of Spades (1833)

“What grace could all your worldly power bring
To One whose crown of thorns has made him King,
The Christ who gave His body to the flails,
Who humbly bore the lance and piercing nails?
Or do you fear the rabble might disgrace The One.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Secular Power
as quoted in Pushkin, Alexander (2009). Selected Lyric Poetry. Northwestern University Press, p. 121.

“Tormented by spiritual thirst,
I dragged myself through a somber desert.
And a six-winged seraph
Appeared to meet me at the crossing of the ways.
He touched my eyes
With fingers as light as a dream:
And my prophetic eyes opened
Like those of a frightened eagle.
He touched my ears
And they were filled with noise and ringing:
And I heard the shuddering of the heavens,
And the flight of the angels in the heights,
And the movement of the beasts of the sea under the waters,
And the sound of the vine growing in the valley.
He bent down to my mouth
And tore out my tongue,
Sinful, decitful, and given to idle talk;
with the right hand steeped in blood
He inserted the tongue of a wise serpent,
Into my benumbed mouth.
He clove my breast with a sword,
And plucked out my quivering heart,
And thrust a coal of live fire
Into my gaping breast.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God called out to me:
'Arise, O prophet, see and hear,
Be filled with my will,
Go forth over land and sea,
And set the hearts of men on fire with your Word.”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Prophet

English translation found in New Society, Volume 8, (1966). New Society Limited. p. 413.
Also quoted by Kahn, Andrew (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge University Press, p. 84.
The Prophet (1826)