Top 180 Mikhail Bulgakov Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Why do smart people exist, if not to figure out convoluted problems?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

52. “Let me have a look.’ Woland stretched out his hand palm uppermost. ‘Unfortunately I cannot show it to you,’ replied the master, ‘because I burned it in my stove.’ ‘I’m sorry but I don’t believe you,’ said Woland. ‘You can’t have done. Manuscripts don’t burn.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

53. “Why try to pursue what is completed?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

54. “She had a look of suffering and I was struck less by her beauty than by the extraordinary loneliness in her eyes.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

55. “Pogroms were whipped up every minute and people were murdered daily, especially Jews of course.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

56. “FOLLOW ME, READER! Who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue! Follow me, reader, and only me and I will show you that love!”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

57. “If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

58. “But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol, of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

59. “What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

60. “Eh, Nikanor Ivanovich!′ the unknown man exclaimed soulfully. ‘What are official and unofficial persons? It all depends on your point of view on the subject. It’s all fluctuating and relative, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I’m a unofficial person, and tomorrow, lo and behold, I’m an official one! And it happens the other way round -oh, how it does!” – Chapter 9.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

61. “What point is there in dying in a ward, listening to the moans and rasps of the terminally ill? Wouldn’t it be better to spend the twenty-seven thousand on a banquet, then, after taking poison, depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by intoxicated beautiful women and dashing friends?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

62. “This hero had gone into the abyss, gone irrevocably, the son of the astrologer-king, forgiven on the eve of Sunday, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

63. “You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

64. “You pronounced your words as if you don’t acknowledge the shadows, or the evil either. Would you be so kind as to give a little thought to the question of what your good would be doing if evil did not exist, and how the earth would look if the shadows were to disappear from it?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

65. “Clever people have been pointing out for a long time that happiness is like good health: when it’s there, you don’t notice it. But when the years have passed, how you do remember happiness, oh, how you do remember it!”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

66. “Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

67. “I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch’s Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don’t exist. But you do believe that it is really I?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

68. “Very well then,” replied the guest, and said weightily and distinctly: “Yesterday at Patriarch’s Ponds you met with Satan.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

69. “But this is what disturbs me: if there is no God, then, the question is, who is in control of man’s life and the whole order of things on earth?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

70. “Azazello begged her not to worry, assuring her that he had seen not only naked women but also women with their skin flayed clean off.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

71. “There is, if you don’t mind my saying so, something sinister about men who avoid wine, games, the company of charming women, and good dinner-table conversation. People like that are either seriously ill or they secretly disdain their fellow men.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

72. “I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp for breath, as though a red-hot crowbar were being thrust into my stomach and rotated. Four minutes after the injection I was able to distinguish the wave-like nature of the pain.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

73. “How sad, ye Gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps! You will know it when you have wandered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; its mists; its swamps and its rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

74. “The time had come to act, to drink the bitter cup of responsibility.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

75. “Do you know with whom you are presently speaking?’ Woland asked the visitor. Whose guest are you? ‘I do,’ replied the master, ‘my neighbour in the madhouse was that boy, Ivan Homeless. He told me about you.’ ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ Woland responded, ‘I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch’s Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don’t exist. But you do believe that it is really I?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

76. “Don’t be afraid, Queen, the blood has long run down into the earth. And on the spot where it was spilled, grapevines are growing today.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

77. “I have just been cut in half by a streetcar at Patriarch’s. Funeral Friday 3PM. Come. Berlioz.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

78. “What are smart people for if not to untangle tangled things?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

79. “Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it’s something that starts in people’s heads. So when these clowns start shouting “Stop the ruin!” – I laugh!′ ‘I swear to you, I find it laughable! Every one of them needs to hit himself on the back of the head and then when he has knocked all the hallucinations out of himself and gets on with sweeping out backyards – which is his real job – all this “ruin” will automatically disappear.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

80. “Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

81. “In the first few seconds an aching sadness wrenched his heart, but it soon gave way to a feeling of sweet disquiet, the excitement of gypsy wanderlust.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

82. “It’s nice to hold on to a holiday midnight a little longer than usual.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

83. “Nobody should be whipped. Remember that, once and for all. Neither man nor animal can be influenced by anything but suggestion.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

84. “Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ’the deepest contemplation of life in all its conditionality.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

85. “There isn’t a single eastern religion,” said Berlioz, “in which, as a rule, a chaste virgin doesn’t give birth to a god. And without inventing anything new, in exactly the same way, the Christians created their Jesus, who in reality never actually lived. And it’s on that the main emphasis needs to be put...”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

86. “All the words he used in the beginning were gutter words. He heard them and stored them in his brain. Now, as I walk in the street, I look at dogs with secret horror. WHo knows what is hidden in their heads?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

87. “The movies are a woman’s only solace in life.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

88. “Soon the room had that desolate look that comes from the chaos of packing up to go away and, worse, from removing the shade from the lamp. Never, never take the shade off a lamp. A lampshade is something sacred. Scuttle away like a rat from danger and into the unknown. Read or doze beside your lampshade; let the storm howl outside and wait until they come for you.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

89. “I was helping the firemen, Messire,” replied Korovyev, indicating his ripped trousers. “Ah, if that’s the case, then of course, a new building will have to be built.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

90. “Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, ‘because I burned it in the stove.’ ‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ’that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

91. “There’s no need for you to intercede for him, Margarita, because the one with whom he so sought to talk has already interceded for him.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

92. “What’s the use of dying in a ward surrounded by a lot of groaning and croaking incurables? Wouldn’t it be much better to throw a party with that twenty-seven thousand and take poison and depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by lovely drunken girls and happy friends?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

93. “Yes, man is mortal, but that would still be just a minor problem. The bad thing is that he’s sometimes suddenly mortal, and that’s the whole point! And he can’t possibly say what he’s going to be doing the same evening.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

94. “The poet had wasted his night while others had spent it enjoying themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever. He only had to lift his head up from the lamp and look at the sky to see that the night had gone beyond return. Waiters were hurriedly jerking the cloths off the tables. The cats pacing the verandah had a morning look about them. Day broke inexorably over the poet.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

95. “Allow me to ask you, then, how man can govern if he cannot plan for even so ridiculously short a span as a thousand years or so, if, in fact, he cannot guarantee his own next day?”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

96. “A dog’s spirit dies hard.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

97. “And to the revenge – on the hacks, the yes-men, the snitches, the hypocrites – that the novel declines to rise above.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

98. “People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

99. “The procurator studied the new arrival with avid, and slightly fearful eyes. It was the kind of look one gives someone one has heard of and thought a lot about, and whom one is meeting for the first time.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov

100. “What you say is true,’ the master observed, struck by the neatness of Koroviev’s work, ’that if there are no papers, there’s no person. I have no papers, so there’s precisely no me.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov