19 Quotes by Ivan Goncharov

But in love, merit is won blindly and unaccountably, and in this blindness and unaccountability lies happiness.pp. 445-446

When you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next. You’re happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you’re going to live for tomorrow.

You have a lunatic before you who has been infected by passion.

It is the trick of dishonest people to offer sacrifices that are not needed or cannot be made so as to avoid making those that are required.

Memories are the height of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain.

It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.

Yesterday one has wished, to-day one attains the madly longed-for object, and to-morrow one will blush to think that one ever desired it.

A close, daily intimacy between two people has to be paid for: it requires a great deal of experience of life, logic, and warmth of heart on both sides to enjoy each other’s good qualities without being irritated by each other’s shortcomings and blaming each other for them.

Love was life’s hardest school of all. p. 259.