Top 200 Nikolai Gogol Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am who I am and that’s who I am.”

— Nikolai Gogol

2. “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”

— Nikolai Gogol

3. “It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.”

— Nikolai Gogol

4. “You can’t imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.”

— Nikolai Gogol

5. “Whatever you may say, the body depends on the soul.”

— Nikolai Gogol

6. “They don’t listen to me, they don’t hear me, they don’t see me.”

— Nikolai Gogol

7. “However stupid a fools words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.”

— Nikolai Gogol

8. “Goodness, how sad is our Russia!”

— Nikolai Gogol

9. “What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself.”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

11. “Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.”

— Nikolai Gogol

12. “Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.”

— Nikolai Gogol

13. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

14. “Every one to his taste, one man loves the priest and another the priest’s wife, as the proverb says.”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

17. “There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

21. “Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

23. “In this world, people always find a way of doing what they want.”

— Nikolai Gogol

24. “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

25. “However foolish be a madman’s words, they may yet prove sufficient to sow doubt in the minds of saner individuals.”

— Nikolai Gogol

26. “Human problems are difficult things to solve. Sometimes a man may be drawn into a vicious circle, so that, having once entered it, he ceases to be himself.”

— Nikolai Gogol

27. “Our country is the one our soul longs for, the one which is dearest of all to us. My country is – you! That is my native land, and I bear that country in my heart.”

— Nikolai Gogol

28. “I brought you into this world. It is on me to take it away.”

— Nikolai Gogol

29. “Such is the Russian man: strong is his passion for knowing someone at least one rank above himself, and a nodding acquaintance with a count or prince is better to him than any close relations with friends.”

— Nikolai Gogol

30. “I tell you straight that I would not eat such nastiness, even had I made it myself. Sugar a frog as much as you like, but never shall it pass MY lips. Nor would I swallow an oyster, for I know only too well what an oyster may resemble. But have some mutton, friend Chichikov. It is shoulder of mutton, and very different stuff from the mutton which they cook in noble kitchens – mutton which has been kicking about the market-place four days or more.”

— Nikolai Gogol

31. “Love us dirty, for any one will love us clean.”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

33. “Two turtle doves will show thee Where my cold ashes lie And sadly murmuring tell thee How in tears I did die.”

— Nikolai Gogol

34. “The “laughter through tears of sorrow” that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message.”

— Nikolai Gogol

35. “I shall laugh my bitter laugh.”

— Nikolai Gogol

36. “Gambling is the great leveller. All men are equal- at cards.”

— Nikolai Gogol

37. “Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?”

— Nikolai Gogol

38. “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

39. “What a strange creature man is! He does not believe in God, but he does believe that if the bridge of is nose itches he is surely going to die;.”

— Nikolai Gogol

40. “As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don’t leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards!”

— Nikolai Gogol

41. “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” and in those heart-rending words he heard others: “I am your brother.”

— Nikolai Gogol

42. “This world is full of the most outrageous nonsense. Sometimes things happen which you would hardly think possible.”

— Nikolai Gogol

43. “Everywhere across whatever sorrows of which our life is woven, some radiant joy will gaily flash past.”

— Nikolai Gogol

44. “Woman is in love with the devil.”

— Nikolai Gogol

45. “It is dull in this world, gentlemen!”

— Nikolai Gogol

46. “Steeds, steeds, what steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes?”

— Nikolai Gogol

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

49. “We have the marvelous gift of making everything insignificant.”

— Nikolai Gogol

50. “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...”

— Nikolai Gogol