Nikolai Gogol

I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

—Nikolai Gogol

A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer.

—Nikolai Gogol

I tell everyone very plainly that I take bribes, but what kind of bribes? Why, greyhound puppies. That’s a totally different matter.

—Nikolai Gogol

As countless as grains of sand by the sea are human passions, and they all differ; all of them, vile or lofty, begin by being under a man’s control and then become his terrible masters. Blessed is he who has chosen the most lofty of passions: his immeasurable bliss grows and multiplies tenfold with every hour and minute, and he penetrates deeper and deeper into the infinite paradise of his soul.

—Nikolai Gogol

It’s not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.

—Nikolai Gogol

The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities.

—Nikolai Gogol

He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else. Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday clothes the spots do not show.

—Nikolai Gogol

Man is such a wondrous being that it is never possible to count up all his merits at once. The more you study him, the more new particulars appear, and their description would be endless.

—Nikolai Gogol

They’re thinking of turning the peasant into an educated man. Why, first of all they should make him a good and prosperous farmer and then he’ll learn all that is necessary for him to know.

—Nikolai Gogol

Nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book.

—Nikolai Gogol

Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?

—Nikolai Gogol

Ah, steeds, steeds, what steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes? Is there a sensitive ear, alert as a flame, in your every fiber? Hearing the familiar song from above, all in one accord you strain your bronze chests and, hooves barely touching the ground, turn into straight lines cleaving the air, and all inspired by God it rushes on!

—Nikolai Gogol

Whatever you may say, the body depends on the soul.

—Nikolai Gogol

But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.

—Nikolai Gogol

Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all.

—Nikolai Gogol

But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.

—Nikolai Gogol

Let me warn you, if you start chasing after views, you’ll be left without bread and without views.

—Nikolai Gogol

What is stronger in us — passion or habit? Or are all the violent impulses, all the whirl of our desires and turbulent passions, only the consequence of our ardent age, and is it only through youth that they seem deep and shattering?

—Nikolai Gogol

Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence–and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

—Nikolai Gogol

I saw that I’d get nowhere on the straight path, and that to go crookedly was straighter.

—Nikolai Gogol

In the end dreams became his life, and his whole life thereafter took a strange turn: one might say he slept while waking and watched while asleep.

—Nikolai Gogol

As it is so strangely ordained in this world, what is amusing will turn into being gloomy, if you stand too long before it, and then God knows what ideas may not stray into the mind… Why is it that even in moments of unthinking, careless gaiety a different and strange mood comes upon one?

—Nikolai Gogol

We ought to thank God for that. Yes, the man who tills the land is more worthy of respect than any.

—Nikolai Gogol

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

—Nikolai Gogol

Keep not money, but keep good people’s company.

—Nikolai Gogol

But there is nothing enduring in the world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface.

—Nikolai Gogol

It’s the most righteous, which of course is not the same thing as the most profitable.

—Nikolai Gogol

We have the marvelous gift of making everything insignificant.

—Nikolai Gogol

There are passions that it is not for man to choose.

—Nikolai Gogol

The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

—Nikolai Gogol