Fathers and Sons

by Ivan Turgenev

Doesn't their superiority consist in there being fewer traces of the slaveowner in them than in us?'

"Happiness is where we are not,"'

Every man hangs on a thread, the abyss may open under his feet any minute, and yet he must go and invent all sorts of discomforts for himself, and spoil his life.'

'I think; here I lie under a haystack…. The tiny space I occupy is so infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space, in which I am not, and which has nothing to do with me; and the period of time in which it is my lot to live is so petty beside the eternity in which I have not been, and shall not be…. And in this atom, this mathematical point,

the blood is circulating, the brain is working and wanting something…. Isn't it loathsome? Isn't it petty?'

There are no general principles—you've not made out that even yet! There are feelings. Everything depends on them.'

'Why, I, for instance, take up a negative attitude, by virtue of my sensations; I like to deny—my brain's made on that plan, and that's all about it! Why do I like chemistry? Why do you like apples?—by virtue of our sensations.