Top 180 Mikhail Bulgakov Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

2. “Manuscripts don’t burn.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

3. “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

4. “The tongue may hide the truth but the eyes – never!”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

5. “Well, as everyone knows, once witchcraft gets started, there’s no stopping it.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

6. “There is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

7. “What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

8. “Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you. They’ll make the offer themselves, and give everything themselves.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

9. “You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

10. “To speak the truth is easy and pleasant.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

11. “But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

12. “Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal – there’s the trick!”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

13. “He who never hurries is always on time.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

14. “Allow me to inquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

15. “One is the much-quoted ‘Manuscripts don’t burn’, which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus become a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master and Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

16. “Second freshness – that’s what is nonsense! There is only one freshness – the first – and it is also the last. And if sturgeon is of the second freshness, that means it is simply rotten.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

17. “The most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

18. “This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel...”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

19. “Who art thou, then?” “Part of that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” Goethe – Faust.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

20. “No documents, no person.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

21. “Not causing trouble, not touching anything, fixing the primus.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

22. “I don’t have any special talents, just an ordinary desire to live like a human being.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

23. “No one’s fate is of any interest to you except your own.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

24. “The evil is in humans, the Devil is not to blame.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

25. “A morphine addict has one piece of good fortune, which nobody can take away from him – the capacity to spend his life in total solitude. And solitude means important, significant ideas, it means contemplation, tranquillity, wisdom...”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

26. “Obedient to constraint, I was compelled to submit.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

27. “Remove the document – and you remove the man.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

28. “He who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

29. “A writer isn’t a writer because he has a membership card but because he writes. How do you know what bright ideas may not be swarming in my head?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

30. “We are speaking different languages, as always, but that doesn’t change the things we talk about.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

31. “She had a passion for all people who did anything to perfection.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

32. “Punch a man on the nose, kick an old man downstairs, shoot somebody or any old thing like that, that’s my job. But argue with women in love – no thank you!”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

33. “I suppose that in no educational institution can one become an educated person.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

34. “Some totalitarians prefer to conceal themselves behind the machinery of the state, but, like the cannibal who lovingly cradles his victim as he digs around for his heart, Stalin liked conversing with his terrorized children. He was an intimate murderer.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

35. “Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

36. “The White Guard, written in the twenties and dealing with the nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of war in all of literature.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

37. “The darkness that had come in from the Mediterranean covered the city so detested by the procurator...”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

38. “Yes, man is mortal, but that isn’t so bad. What’s bad is that sometimes he’s unexpectedly mortal, that’s the rub. And, in general, he can’t even say in the morning what he’ll be doing that very same night.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

39. “Once upon a time there was a lady. She had no children, and no happiness either. And at first she cried for a long time, but then she became wicked...”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

40. “You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself. They will make the offer and they will give of their own accord.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

41. “The only thing he said was that among human vices he considered cowardice one of the first.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

42. “Once more and for the last time, the moon flashed above and broke into pieces, and then everything went black.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

43. “There’s only one degree of freshness – the first, which makes it also the last.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

44. “His only words were that he regarded cowardice as one of the worst human sins.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

45. “I said that any sort of power is coercion of the people, and that the time will come when there will be no power, neither of the caesars, nor of any other sort of authority. Man will move on to the kingdom of truth and justice where no kind of power will be needed at all.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

46. “I challenge you to a duel!” screamed the cat, sailing over their heads on the swinging chandelier.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

47. “That’s really bad,” concluded the host, “say what you will, but there’s something evil lurking in men who avoid wine, games, the society of delightful women, table talk. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly hate those around them. True, exceptions are possible. Among those who have sat down with me at the banqueting table, there have sometimes been some astonishing scoundrels! And so, I’m listening to why you’re here.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

48. “Difficult folk, these women!”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

49. “Ah, what stars there are in the Ukraine. I’ve been living in Moscow almost seven years, but I still feel drawn to my homeland. My heart aches, I get a terrible urge to board a train and be off. To see the cliffs covered in.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

50. “For some reason, cats are usually addressed familiarly, though no cat has ever drunk bruderschaft with anyone.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov