Quotes from Belinsky (200 quotes)
Vissarion Belinsky is a prominent representative of Russian critical thought of the 19th century. He became the founder of this artistic movement in Russia. The writer supported Western ideas and was ahead of the bourgeois thought of his time. The family did not have enough finances to support their son, but this did not stop him. The arrogant young man lived from hand to mouth until he was awarded a scholarship. Belinsky received his education at public expense. We present you the most significant quotes from Belinsky.
Authority and friendship are water and fire, heterogeneous and hostile things; equality is a condition of friendship.
A wife is not a mistress, but a friend and companion of our life, and we must get used to the idea of loving her both when she is an elderly woman and when she is an old woman.
Where there is no complete frankness, complete trust, where even a little is hidden, there is no and cannot be friendship.
Apathy and laziness are true freezing of the soul and body.
Education is a great thing: it decides a person’s fate.
Without striving for the infinite there is no life, no development, no progress.
Without love and hate, without sympathy and antipathy, a person is a ghost.
No matter how much love is idealized, how can one not see that nature has endowed people with this wonderful feeling, both for their happiness and for the reproduction and maintenance of the human race.
My friend is the one to whom I can tell everything.
Without a deep moral feeling, a person can have neither love nor honor - nothing that makes a person a person.
To live means to feel and think, to suffer and to bliss, any other life is death.
Struggle is a condition of life: life dies when the struggle ends.
Without passions and contradictions there is no life, no poetry. If only there were rationality and humanity in these passions and contradictions, and their results would lead a person to his goal.
There is nothing more dangerous than connecting your fate with the fate of a woman simply because she is beautiful and young.
Finding your way, finding out your place - this is everything for a person, this means for him to become himself.
Without health, happiness is impossible.
Love and respect for parents, without any doubt, is a sacred feeling.
In the important matters of life one must always hurry as if everything were to perish from the loss of one minute.
Without a goal there is no activity, without interests there is no goal, and without activity there is no life. The source of interests, goals and activities is the substance of social life.
In my deep conviction, the marriage union should be alien to any publicity, this matter concerns only two people - no one else.
Marriage is the reality of love. Only a fully mature soul can truly love, and in this case, love sees in marriage its highest reward and, with the brilliance of the crown, does not fade, but blooms its fragrant color more magnificently, as in the rays of the sun...
Struggle is a condition of life: life dies when the struggle ends.
Art without the idea that a person without a soul is a corpse.
Inspiration is not the exclusive property of the artist: without it, even a scientist will not go far, without it even a craftsman will do little, because it is everywhere, in every business, in every work.
It is good for those who know how to preserve, even in the winter of their days, the fertile flame of the heart, living sympathy for all that is great and beautiful in existence.
Education is a great thing: it decides a person’s fate.
Nature creates man, but society develops and shapes him.
The greatest treasure is a good library.
Reason and feeling are two forces that equally need each other; they are dead and insignificant without the other.
Seeing a beautifully published empty book is just as unpleasant as seeing an empty person enjoying all the material benefits of life.
It is good for him who, not content with the present reality, carried in his soul the ideal of a better existence, lived and breathed with one thought - to promote, according to the means given to him by nature, the realization of the ideal on earth.
There is nothing more useless and even more harmful than instructions, even the best ones, if they are not supported by examples, and are not justified in the eyes of the student by the entirety of the reality surrounding him.
A woman’s field is to arouse in a man the energy of the soul, the ardor of noble passions, to maintain a sense of duty and the desire for the high and great - this is her purpose, and it is great and sacred.
Every love is true and beautiful in its own way, as long as it is in the heart and not in the head.
Many people live without living, but only intending to live.
There are all kinds of people and all kinds of passions. For another, for example, all the passion, all the pathos of his nature is cold anger, and he is only smart, talented and even healthy when he bites.
What you don’t know the senses about, what you don’t understand, then scold: this is the general rule of mediocrity.
In youth, everyone is more accessible than at any other age to everything that is lofty and beautiful. It is good for him who preserves his youth until old age, without allowing his soul to cool down, harden, or petrify.
Inspiration is not the exclusive property of the artist: without it, even a scientist will not go far, without it even a craftsman will do little, because it is everywhere, in every business, in every work.
There is no person so bad that good education would not make him better.
In my deep conviction, the marriage union should be alien to all publicity; this matter concerns only two people - no one else.
Every dignity, every strength is calm - precisely because they are confident in themselves.
People die so that humanity can live.
It is stupid to lay out a sea map in front of you when crossing a puddle on a shuttle.
The greatest weakness of the mind is distrust of the powers of the mind.
Wreaths of immortality have become very expensive these days.
The instrument and mediator of education should be love.
The mind is a person's spiritual weapon.
It's not the word, but the tone in which the word is pronounced.
He who does not belong to his fatherland does not belong to humanity.
Money is the sun of life, without which life is hard, dark and cold.
Believing and not knowing still means something to a person; but knowing and not believing means absolutely nothing.
Initial education should see in a child not an official, not a poet, not a craftsman, but a person who could later be one or the other without ceasing to be a person.
Of all critics, the greatest, the most brilliant, the most infallible is time.
For low natures, there is nothing more pleasant than to take revenge for one’s insignificance, throwing the mud of one’s views and opinions into the holy and great.
The book is the life of our time, everyone needs it - both old and young.
If the choice in love were decided only by will and reason, then love would not be a feeling and passion.
To educate does not mean only to feed and nurse, but also to give direction to the heart and mind - and for this, doesn’t it require character, science, development, and accessibility to all human interests on the part of the mother?
A student will never surpass a teacher if he sees him as a model and not a rival.
Work ennobles a person.
If humanity has achieved a lot so far, this means that it must achieve even more in the near future. It has already begun to understand that it is humanity: soon it will really want to become humanity.
Feeling is fire, thought is oil.
There are many types of education and development, and each of them is important in itself, but moral education should be higher than all of them.
A woman thinks with her heart, but a man loves with his head.
Everything is good, great, and reasonable - in its time and in its place.
The peacock, proudly spreading its lush tail in front of other birds, is considered a beautiful animal, but... not smart.
Only in honest and selfless activity lies the condition of human dignity.
The sense of humanity is insulted when people do not respect the human dignity of others, and is even more insulted and suffers when a person does not respect his own dignity.
Nasty, arrogant self-praise; but no less disgusting is a person without any consciousness of any strength, any dignity.
The school of misfortune is the best school.
Scoundrels are successful in their affairs because they treat honest people as if they were scoundrels, and honest people treat scoundrels as if they were honest people.
We envy our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who are destined to see Russia in 1940 standing at the head of the educated world, giving laws to both science and art and receiving reverent tribute from all enlightened humanity.
There is no crime to love several times in life, and there is no merit to love only once: reproaching yourself for the first and boasting about the second is equally absurd.
He who does not go forward goes back: there is no standing position.
Love has its own laws of development, its own ages, just like human life. It has its own luxurious spring, its own hot summer, and finally, autumn, which for some is warm, bright and fertile, for others cold, rotten and barren.
Love often makes a mistake, seeing in a beloved object something that is not there, but sometimes only love reveals in it the beautiful or great, which is inaccessible to observation and the mind.
People usually do not so much enjoy what they have been given as grieve over what they have not been given.
The measure of a woman's worth can be the man she loves.
Every noble person is deeply aware of his blood relationship, his blood ties with the fatherland.
Moral indifference is a disease of overeducated people.
If the whole purpose of our life consisted only in our personal happiness, and our personal happiness consisted only in love alone, then life would truly be a gloomy desert... But praise be to eternal reason, praise to protective providence! There is another great world of life for man, besides the inner world of the heart - the world of historical contemplation and social activity.
Of all the bad habits that reveal a lack of solid education and an excess of good-natured ignorance, the worst is calling things by other names than they are.
Poetry is the highest kind of art.
Bourgeois owners are prosaically positive people. Their favorite rule: everyone is to himself and for himself. They want to be right according to civil law and do not want to hear about the laws of humanity and morality.
Every extreme is the sister of limitation.
Not doing is not living. He who does not carry within himself the source of life, that is, the source of living activity, who does not rely on himself, always expects everything from the external and random.
Laughter is often a great mediator in distinguishing truth from lies.
You can not love your own brother if he is a bad person, but you cannot help but love your fatherland, no matter what it is: it is only necessary that this love should not be a dead contentment with what is, but a living desire for improvement.
The word reflects the thought: if the thought is incomprehensible, the word is also incomprehensible.
Men with an effeminate character are the most poisonous lampoon of a person.
Any satire that bites is morally rich.
Who will tell me the truth about me, if not a friend, and hearing the truth about yourself from another is necessary.
There is nothing holier and more selfless than a mother’s love; every attachment, every love, every passion is either weak or self-interested in comparison with it.
We question and interrogate the past so that it can explain our present and give us hints about our future.
Whoever sharply expresses his opinions about the actions of others obliges himself to act better than others.
Every dignity, every strength is calm – precisely because they are confident in themselves.
Equality is a condition of friendship.
Every noble person is deeply aware of his blood relationship, his blood ties with the fatherland.
Only ideas, not words, have lasting power over society.
Honest people always have the bad habit of lowering their eyes in shame before impudence and impudent meanness.
Finding your way, finding out your place - this is everything for a person, this means for him to become himself.
The highest and most sacred interest of society is its own welfare, equally extended to each of its members.
A woman's life is primarily centered in the life of the heart; to love means to live for her; and to sacrifice means to love.
Finding the cause of evil is almost the same as finding a cure for it.
Patriotism, no matter who it is, is proven not by word, but by deed.
Attacks on the shortcomings and vices of a nationality are not a crime, but a merit, there is true patriotism.
No person in the world is born ready-made, that is, fully formed, but his entire life is nothing more than a continuously moving development, a ceaseless formation.
Our audience is a bourgeois among the nobility: if only they were invited into the ceremoniously illuminated hall, and out of gratitude that she, a serf, was allowed into the master's mansion, she will certainly remain pleased with everything.
Only that which is devoid of a strong grain of life and which, therefore, is not worth living, perishes in the stream of time.
For us there is no greater misfortune than, having taken upon ourselves moral responsibility for the happiness of a woman, to tear her heart to pieces, even if involuntarily.
Reason is given to man so that he can live wisely, and not so that he can see that he is living unwisely.
In the words “god” and “religion” I see darkness, gloom, chains and whips.
Superstition passes with the success of civilization.
A person expresses himself clearly when he is in possession of a thought, but even more clearly when he is in possession of a thought.
Seeing and respecting a person in a woman is not only necessary, but also the main condition for the possibility of love for a decent person of our time.
The heart has its own laws - true, but not those from which it would be easy to compile a complete systematic code.
It’s not good to be sick, it’s even worse to die, but to be sick and die with the thought that there will be nothing left in the world after you is the worst of all.
There is nothing more pleasant than plucking the peacock feathers from a crow and proving to her that she belongs to the breed that she has decided to despise.
A father loves his child because it is his birth; but he must still love him as a future person. Only such love for children is true and worthy of being called love; every other one is egoism, cold self-love.
All people drink and eat, but only savages get drunk and overeat.
Russia needs not sermons (she has heard them enough!), not prayers (she has repeated them enough!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of human dignity, lost for so many centuries in dirt and dung, rights and laws consistent not with the teachings of the church, but with common sense and justice, and their strict implementation, if possible.
It is impossible to create a language, because it is created by the people; philologists only discover its laws and bring them into a system, and writers only create on it in accordance with these laws.
Sociality, sociality - or death! That's my motto. What does it matter to me that the common life lives when the individual suffers? What does it matter to me that a genius on earth lives in the sky when the crowd is wallowing in the mud?
Humanism is love of humanity, but developed by consciousness and education.
Depravity consists of animal sensuality, in which there can no longer be any poetry, because only rational elements of life can enter into poetry, and there is no rationality in that which degrades a person to an animal.
Love is given only to love.
Nature creates man, but society develops and shapes him.
The soul, like the body, has its own gymnastics, without which the soul languishes and falls into the apathy of inaction.
There is no need to lie or flatter as a joke. Let everyone think what they want about you, and you be what you are.
The ability to create is a great gift of nature; the act of creativity in the creative soul is a great sacrament; a minute of creativity is a minute of great sacred rite.
Only work can make a person happy, bringing his soul into clarity, harmony and self-satisfaction.
Love requires reasonable maintenance, like oil to support a fire.
The point is not to never make mistakes, but to be able to recognize them and be generous and boldly follow your conscience.
Man is neither a beast nor an angel; he must love not animalally or platonically, but humanly.
In true talent, every face is a type, and every type is a familiar stranger to the reader.
A belief should be valuable only because it is true, and not at all because it is ours.
To use a foreign word when there is an equivalent Russian word means to insult both common sense and common taste.
A scientist must be a knight of truth.
It’s good to be a scientist, poet, warrior, legislator, etc., but it’s not bad to be a human being.
A person fears only what he does not know; knowledge conquers all fear.
Man has always been and will be the most curious phenomenon for man.
Love is so strong that it creates the incomprehensible, triumphs over the eternally unchanged conditions of space and time, over the powerlessness of the flesh, and gives the baby the lion's strength.
Without a goal there is no activity, without interests there is no goal, and without activity there is no life. The source of interests, goals and activities is the substance of social life.
The desire for death shows the most false and illusory state of mind.
Of all human passions, after self-love, the strongest, the most ferocious is the love of power.
That the Russian language is one of the richest languages in the world, there is no doubt about it.
Let the child play pranks and play pranks, as long as his pranks and pranks are not harmful and do not bear the imprint of physical and moral cynicism.
Finding your way, finding out your place - this is everything for a person, this means for him to become himself.
It is good to be a scientist, a poet, a warrior, a legislator, etc., but it is bad not to be a human being.
Life is a trap, and we are mice; others manage to pick the bait and get out of the trap, but most die in it, and they barely sniff the bait. Silly comedy, damn it.
Only willpower is the condition for our success in our chosen field.
Truth is above people and should not be afraid of them.
Love is given only to love.
Slander is not always an act of malice: most often it is the fruit of an innocent desire to dispel an entertaining conversation, and sometimes the fruit of goodwill and participation as sincere as it is awkward.
Friendship, like love, is a rose with a luxurious color, an intoxicating aroma, but also with prickly thorns.
If talent does not have sufficient strength within itself to align itself with its aspirations and enterprises, it produces only empty flowers when you expect fruit from it.
There is also a great world of life for a person, besides the inner world of the heart - the world of historical content and social activity - that great world where thought becomes action, high feeling - feat... And it is good for him who was not an idle spectator looking at this ocean of noisily rushing life.
There are women who just have to appear enthusiastic, passionate, and they are yours; but there are women whom a man can arouse to his attention only by indifference, coldness and skepticism as signs of enormous demands on life or as a result of a life lived rebelliously and fully.
A wife is not a mistress, but a friend and companion of our life, and we must get used to the idea of loving her even when she is an elderly woman.
There are people in whose hands even a simple stick is more dangerous than in others a sword.
Knowledge of facts is precious only because ideas are hidden in facts; facts without ideas are trash for the head and memory.
If love betrays a woman, she has nothing left in life, and she must fall, perish under the burden of the disaster that has befallen her, or die in soul for the rest of her life, no matter how long this life lasts.
The art of making people laugh is more difficult than the art of touching.
Truly human love can be based only on mutual respect for each other's human dignity, and not on one whim of feelings and not on one whim of the heart.
The source of everything new is old; at least new things are being prepared for the old.
The starting point of moral perfection is, first of all, material need.
Whatever the activity, habit and the ability to act acquired through it are a great thing. Those who did not sit idly by even when there was nothing to do will be able to act when the time comes for this.
When a person gives himself entirely to lies, his intelligence and talent leave him.
He who fears knowledge is lost.
Literature, as a society, has its plebeians, its mob, and the mob everywhere is ignorant, insolent, and shameless.
Love goodness, and then you will necessarily be useful to your fatherland, without thinking or trying to be useful to it.
Love and respect for parents, without any doubt, is a sacred feeling.
Love, as one of the strongest passions that carries a person to all extremes more than any other passion, can serve as a touchstone of morality.
Bourgeois owners are prosaically positive people. Their favorite rule: everyone is to himself and for himself. They want to be right according to civil law and do not want to hear about the laws of humanity and morality.
Finding your way, finding out your place - this is everything for a person, this means for him to become himself.
Attacks... on the shortcomings and vices of the nationality are not a crime, but a merit, there is true patriotism.
Not doing is not living. He who does not carry within himself the source of life, that is, the source of living activity, who does not rely on himself, always expects everything from the external and random.
It is an axiom that beauty is a necessary condition for art, that without beauty there is and cannot be art.
True artists are equally successful in types of scoundrels and decent people.
The truth only at the beginning meets strong resistance, but the more it comes to light, the more it becomes a fact, the more friends and champions it gains.
In truth alone there is life and goodness: truth does not require the help of lies.
A bad, erroneous understanding of the truth does not destroy the truth itself.
The most bitter truth is better than the most pleasant delusion.
Whatever the activity, habit and the ability to act acquired through it are a great thing. Those who did not sit idly by when there was nothing to do will be able to act when the time comes for this.
Passion is the source of all living, fruitful activity.
Nasty, arrogant self-praise; but no less disgusting is a person without any consciousness of any glory, any dignity.
Of all types of glory, the most flattering, the greatest, the most incorruptible is the people's glory.
Only happiness is the measure and test of love.
Marriage is the duality of love. Only a fully mature soul can truly love, and in this case, love sees in marriage its highest reward and, with the brilliance of the crown, does not fade, but blooms its fragrant color more magnificently, as in the rays of the sun...
Those who have nothing of their own to say are better off remaining silent.
Every person has his own history, and history has its own critical moments: and a person can be unmistakably judged only by how he acted and what he is like at these moments, when his life and honor would lie on the scales of fate, and happiness. And the higher a person is, the more grandiose his story is, the more terrible the critical moments, and the more solemn and astounding the way out of them.
There is no crime to love several times in life, and there is no merit to love only once: reproaching yourself for the first and boasting about the second is equally absurd.
Society is not like a private person: a person can be insulted, you can slander - society is above insults and slander.
Patriotism does not consist in pompous exclamations in common places, but in an ardent feeling of love for the motherland, which can be expressed without exclamations and is revealed not only in delight for the good, but also in painful hostility towards the bad, which inevitably occurs in every land, therefore, in every fatherland.
The difference between man and animals lies precisely in the fact that he only begins where animals already end.
Reason and feeling are two forces that equally need each other, dead and insignificant without the other.
Jealousy without sufficient reason is a disease of insignificant people who do not respect either themselves or their rights to the affection of the object they love; it reveals the petty tyranny of a creature standing at the level of animal egoism.
The ability to always be in a good mood is the most solid foundation of happiness in this sublunary world.
To become funny means to lose your business.
Only golden mediocrity enjoys the enviable privilege of not irritating anyone and not having enemies or adversaries.
"Furious Vissarion"
Belinsky Vissarion Grigorievich is, without exaggeration, a famous and famous literary critic, philosopher and writer of the 19th century. He was the first to take the work of a critic to a new level, moving away from ingrained rules and frameworks. Belinsky began not only to evaluate a literary work, pointing out certain errors, but also began to express his thoughts in writing in the form of an article or note. He poured his soul and passion into writing his critical works. Reading Belinsky’s articles you can feel this, because they are imbued with his pulsating energy. It was precisely for his determination, integrity, independence, ideological spirit, and love for the work in which he was engaged that he was called “Furious Vissarion.”
Follower of Belinsky
Many future critics and publicists at that time were influenced by Belinsky’s activities. One of them was Nikolai Dobrolyubov, a literary critic and underground revolutionary. He continued the work Belinsky had begun. During his short life, Dobrolyubov wrote a large number of critical articles that touched on various social, spiritual, and moral topics of society. Yaro opposed serfdom and everything connected with it. He was committed to the equality of all people. In his works he also criticized the Russian education system, which suppressed the “I” in children. He criticized literature and textbooks for children, which published a large amount of deliberately false materials. The critic believed that according to them it was impossible to normally educate “the personal independence of the child and the spiritual forces of his nature.” Quotes from Belinsky and Dobrolyubov are similar in their ideological content and zeal to change Russian literature, in particular its critical area, for the better.
short biography
Vissarion Belinsky was born on June 1, 1811 in the Finnish city of Sveaborg, in the family of a naval doctor. His childhood was spent in the city of Chembara, Penza province, where his father transferred to work as a district doctor. Childhood was not easy; Vissarion had many unpleasant memories associated with both his father and mother. Belinsky probably loved his parents somewhere, but he had practically no respect and was even ashamed. After all, they did not pay the necessary attention to their only child. The mother did little to raise her son, leaving this activity to the nannies, and the father was a tyrant, humiliated him, insulted him, and often beat him. This left its heavy imprint on Vissarion.
My mother was a keen hunter of gossips; I, an infant, remained with a nanny, a hired girl; So that I wouldn’t bother her with my screams, she strangled and beat me. However, I was not breastfed: I was born sick on the verge of death, I did not take the breast and did not know it... I sucked on a cone, and even if the milk was sour and rotten, I could not take fresh... My father could not stand me, scolded me, humiliated me, he found fault, beat him mercilessly and scolded him harshly - his eternal memory. I was a stranger in the family.
But, despite the difficult life situation, Belinsky began to study literacy and writing at the district school of his city, from which he transferred to the provincial gymnasium. Since it did not fully satisfy him, he dropped out of school before completing his studies for six months. In 1829, Vissarion entered the philological faculty of Moscow University. There his status as the creator of Russian literary critical thought begins to take shape. But three years later he was expelled for being too harsh in his criticism of serfdom. Around the same time, he began to write his first literary critical articles.
In 1843, Vissarion Belinsky married Maria Orlova, whom he had already known for many years. In their marriage, their daughter Olga was born in 1845 (two more of their children died before reaching the age of one year). In the same year, Belinsky suffered a serious illness, which made itself felt until the end of his life. Even treatment abroad did not bring positive results. As a result, living out the last days of his life in St. Petersburg, on June 7, 1848, Belinsky died from an aggravated illness.
Pechorin
In his judgments about the main character of “A Hero of Our Time,” Pechorin, Belinsky compares him with the equally famous Pushkin hero Evgeny Onegin. He compares these two personalities with each other. And although these two novels are permeated with the same idea - to show the true prose of life, their heroes are radically different from each other. It is Pechorin who the critic considers a real “hero of our time.” Although Belinsky criticizes the main character for his unpleasant actions, he still sees in him a person who, in his image, personifies the problems of the current, at that time, society. Although these problems remain relevant to this day. Pechorin understands his problem, tries to find a solution to it, fights his demons. He doesn't want to accept life as it is, the same way everyone else does. He had a lot of strength, energy and skills, which he wasted in vain, trying in every possible way to find use for them. It was for this that Belinsky highly appreciated Pechorin, unlike other critics.
Quotes from Belinsky about Pechorin:
His restless spirit requires movement, activity seeks food, his heart longs for interest in life. This person has fortitude and willpower.
So - “A Hero of Our Time” - this is the main idea of the novel. In fact, after this the entire novel may be considered evil irony, because most of the readers will probably exclaim: “What a good hero!” - Why is he bad? – we dare to ask you.
He did everything he could, there was nothing new. This led Pechorin to a split personality, which cannot be denied.
In fact, there are two people in it: the first acts, the second looks at the actions of the first and reasons about them, or, better said, condemns them, because they are truly worthy of condemnation. The reasons for the split nature are the contradiction between the depth of nature and the pitifulness of the actions of the same person.
