Quotes from Nikolai Gogol

Manilov was pleased by these final words, but he still couldn't make sense of the deal itself, and for want of an answer, he began sucking his clay pipe so hard that it started to wheeze like a bassoon. He seemed to be trying to extract from it an opinion about this unprecedented business; but the clay pipe only wheezed and said nothing.

The present generation sees everything clearly, marvels at the errors and laughs at the follies of its forefathers, not seeing that there are streaks of heavenly light in that history, that every letter in it cries aloud to them, that on all sides a pointing finger is turned upon it, upon the present generation. But the present generation laughs and proudly, self-confidently, enters upon a series of fresh errors at which their descendants will laugh again in their turn.

But the future is unknown, and stands before a man like autumnal fogs rising from the swamps; birds fly foolishly up and down in it with flapping wings, never recognizing each other, the dove seeing not the vulture, nor the vulture the dove, and no one knowing how far he may be flying from destruction.

You can always tell a pig by its grunt.

Every one to his taste, one man loves the priest and another the priest's wife, as the proverb says.

It is dull in this world, gentlemen!

Consequently he himself perceived that a knowledge of mankind would have availed him more than all the legal refinements and philosophical maxims in the world could do.

Il disparut à jamais, cet être sans défense à qui personne n'avait jamais témoigné d'affection, ni porté le moindre intérêt, non, personne, pas même l'un de ces naturalistes toujours prêts à épingler la plus banale des mouches pour l'examiner au microscope.

It seemed that both had lately had a touch of that pain under the waistband which comes of a sedentary life.

This gentleman evidently belonged to the category of those people who wish the Government to interfere in everything, even in their daily quarrels with their wives.

He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings.

He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation.

But, along with the street lamp, everything breathes deceit. It lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves its dense mass upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the houses, when the whole city turns into a rumbling and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the bridges, postillions shout and bounce on their horses, and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks.

I've long suspected dogs of being much smarter than people; I was even certain they could speak, but there was only some kind of stubbornness in them. They're extraordinary politicians: they notice every human step.

Moreover, he had a peculiar knack, as he walked along the street, of arriving beneath a window just as all sorts of rubbish were being flung out of it: hence he always bore about on his hat scraps of melon rinds and other such articles.

En sus ojos se leía a menudo el ardiente deseo de tomar parte en alguna conversación interesante o de juntarse a otro grupo, pero se retenía al pensar que aquello podía parecer excesivo por su parte o demasiado familiar, y que con ello rebajaría su dignidad. Y por eso permanecía eternamente solo, en la misma actitud silenciosa, emitiendo de cuando en cuando un sonido monótono, con lo cual llegó a pasar por un hombre de lo más aburrido.

I am very fond of the theatre. If I have only a kopeck in my pocket, I always go there. Most of my fellow-officials are uneducated boors, and never enter a theatre unless one throws free tickets at their head.

But yet with all this, although, of course, one may admit this, that and the other, may even... and after all, where aren't there incongruities?

All this has for me an indescribable charm, perhaps because I no longer see it, and because anything from which we are separated is pleasing to us.

Here, precisely here, man imitates God: God granted Himself the work of creation, as the highest delight, and He demands that man, too, be a creator of prosperity and the harmonious course of things. And this they call dull!

Tell him the wedding is being prepared, only there won't be any music at our wedding: deacons will sing instead of pipes and mandolins. I won't step out to dance with my bridegroom: they will bear me away. Dark, dark will be my house: of maple wood it will be, and instead of a chimney there will be a cross on its roof!

A Russian peasant scratching the back of his head means many different things.

Certain persons in the world exist, not as personalities in themselves, but as spots or specks on the personalities of others. Always they are to be seen sitting in the same place, and holding their heads at exactly the same angle, so that one comes within an ace of mistaking them for furniture, and thinks to oneself that never since the day of their birth can they have spoken a single word.

Everywhere, in whatever realm of life, whether among its callous, coarsely impoverished and messily moldering lower ranks, or among its monotonously gelid and tediously tidy upper strata, everywhere, if but once, a person will encounter a phenomenon on his journey that is unlike anything he has chanced to see heretofore and that, at least once will awake in him a feeling unlike any he is fated to feel for the rest of his life.