Quotes from Nikolai Gogol

Taras Bulba: I brought you into this world and I can take you out. Taras: My son, why? Why? Andrei Bulba: I did what I had to do. Taras: From the day I plunged you in the river to give you life, I loved you as I loved the steppes. You were my pride! I gave you life. It is on me to take it away from you. Taras: Put your faith in your sword and your sword in the Pole.

He was already beginning, as always happens at a respectable age, to take a firm stand for Raphael and the old masters––not because he was fully convinced of their lofty merit, but so as to shove them in the faces of young artists.

What do you want?" in a curt hard voice, which he had practised in his room in private, and before the looking-glass, for a whole week before being raised to his present rank.

Now it is all clear, and as plain as a pikestaff. Formerly—I don't know why—everything seemed veiled in a kind of mist. That is, I believe, because people think that the human brain is in the head. Nothing of the sort; it is carried by the wind from the Caspian Sea.

Beauty works perfect miracles. All inner shortcomings in a beauty, instead of causing repugnance, become somehow extraordinarily attractive; vice itself breathes comeliness in them; but if it were to disappear, then a woman would have to be twenty times more intelligent than a man in order to inspire, if not love, at least respect.

And in a very civil fashion did Manilov did so, even going as far as to address the man in the second person plural.

in accordance with the primitive arrangement of things, the most trifling causes produce the greatest events, and the grandest undertakings end in the most insignificant results.

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

One must keep a store of common sense," said Tchitchikov, "and consult one's common sense at every minute, have a friendly conversation with it.

And Petersburg was left without Akakii Akakievich, as though he had never lived there. A being disappeared, and was hidden, who was protected by none, dear to none, interesting to none, who never even attracted to himself the attention of an observer of nature, who omits no opportunity of thrusting a pin through a common fly, and examining it under the microscope...

It does not need much wisdom to utter words of reproof; but much wisdom is needed to find such words as do not embitter a man's misfortune, but encourage him, restore to him his spirit, put spurs to the horse of his soul, refreshed by water.

In the corner shop, or, rather, in its window, a purveyor of hot spiced honey drinks had installed himself, with a samovar of red copper and a face just as red as the samovar, so that from a distance you might think that there were two samovars standing in the window, if one samovar hadn't been wearing a beard black as pitch.

The more debris there is the more it will show the governor's activity.

For every man there are certain words that are as if closer and more intimate to him that any others. And often, unexpectedly, in some remote, forsaken backwater, some deserted desert, one meets a man whose warming conversation makes you forget the pathlessness of your paths, the homelessness of your nights, and the contemporary world full of people's stupidity, of deceptions for deceiving man.

And what in earlier years would have brought animation to my face, arousing laughter and incessant chatter, now slips past me and my immobile lips preserve an impassive silence. Oh my youth! Oh my freshness!

You can do anything and smash anything in the world with a kopeck.

Everywhere, despite all the sorrows from which our lives are woven, there will flash a glittering dream of joy, just like a brilliant carriage with gold trappings, fairytale steeds, sparkling windows which suddenly appears from nowhere and flashes past some wretched backwater village, which has never seen anything other than farm carts, and for a long time after the peasants remain standing, mouths agape and caps still doffed, although the wondrous carriage has long since passed from view

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 descriptions would be endless.

Business was successfully concluded. But—strange is man: he was deeply mortified at being in disfavour with the very people whom he did not respect, and whose vanity and love of dress he derided.

Seek ye not riches, seek but the society of good men.

In this holy russia of ours everything is infected by a mania for imitation, and everyone apes his superior

Un artista anche nell'angoscia esprime tranquillità.

The human feelings, which had never been very deep in him, grew shallower every hour, and every day something more dropped away from the decrepit wreck.

Intr-adevar, peste doua minute, nasul iesi. Era într-o uniforma cusuta în fir de aur, cu guler tare si înalt, cu pantaloni din piele de caprioara si cu sabie la sold. Dupa palaria cu pompon de pene, se putea vedea ca avea gradul de consilier de stat.