Top 200 Nikolai Gogol Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “So,” went on Chichikov, “if no obstacle stands in the way, we might as well proceed to the completion of the purchase.” “What? Of the purchase of the dead souls?” “Of the ‘dead’ souls? Oh dear no! Let us write them down as LIVING ones, seeing that that is how they figure in the census returns.”

— Nikolai Gogol

52. “The nose looked at the Major and frowned a little.”

— Nikolai Gogol

53. “Let me warn you, if you start chasing after views, you’ll be left without bread and without views.”

— Nikolai Gogol

54. “Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.”

— Nikolai Gogol

55. “There are certain words which are nearer and dearer to a man than any others.”

— Nikolai Gogol

56. “But until now I did not understand; everything was in a sort of mist. And I believe it all arose from believing that the brain is in the head. It’s not so at all; it comes with the wind from the direction of the Caspian Sea.”

— Nikolai Gogol

57. “What is stronger in us – passion or habit? Or are all the violent impulses, all the whirl of our desires and turbulent passions, only the consequence of our ardent age, and is it only through youth that they seem deep and shattering?”

— Nikolai Gogol

58. “We ought to thank God for that. Yes, the man who tills the land is more worthy of respect than any.”

— Nikolai Gogol

59. “His old overcoat and unstylish clothes showed him to be a man who was selflessly devoted to his work and had no time to concern himself with his attire, which always has some mysterious attraction for the young.”

— Nikolai Gogol

60. “Suddenly he stopped as if rooted outside the doors of one house; before his eyes an inexplicable phenomenon occurred: a carriage stopped at the entrance; the door opened; a gentleman in a uniform jumped out, hunching over, and ran up the stairs. What was Kovalev’s horror as well as amazement when he recognized him as his own nose!”

— Nikolai Gogol

61. “Being disappeared who was protected by none, dear to none, interesting to none, and who never even attracted to himself the attention of those students of human nature who omit no opportunity of thrusting a pin through a common fly, and examining it under the microscope.”

— Nikolai Gogol

62. “A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer.”

— Nikolai Gogol

63. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

64. “Russia! Russia! What is the incomprehensible, mysterious force that draws me to you? Why does your mournful song, carried along your whole length and breadth from sea to sea, each and re-echo incessantly in my ears? What is there in that song? What is it that calls, and sobs, and clutches at my heart? What are those sounds that caress me so poignantly, that go straight to my soul and twine about my heart? Russia! What do you want from me? What is that mysterious, hidden bond between us?”

— Nikolai Gogol

65. “Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.”

— Nikolai Gogol

66. “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 description would be endless.”

— Nikolai Gogol

67. “Countless are, as the sand in the sea, the deep desires of men, and none resembles the other, and all of them, whether shameful, or great, in the beginning are obedient, but later become terrible masters over him.”

— Nikolai Gogol

68. “They christened the child, whereat he wept and made a grimace, as though he foresaw that he was to be a titular councillor. In.”

— Nikolai Gogol

69. “Every man who has lived in the world and mixed with his fellow men will have remarked something which has remained hidden from the eyes of others;.”

— Nikolai Gogol

70. “And for long years to come I am destined by some strange fate to walk hand in hand with my odd heroes, to gaze at life in its vast movement, to gaze upon it through laughter seen by the world and tears unseen and unknown by it!”

— Nikolai Gogol

71. “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!”

— Nikolai Gogol

72. “Ah! I – to you, Petrovitch, this – ” It must be known that Akakiy Akakievitch expressed himself chiefly by prepositions, adverbs, and scraps of phrases which had no meaning whatever.”

— Nikolai Gogol

73. “The Lord grant we may all be tillers of the soil.”

— Nikolai Gogol

74. “After a brief postprandial snooze he ordered the necessaries for washing, and spent an extraordinarily long time lathering both cheeks with soap, while distending each in turn from the inside with his tongue. Then, pulling the towel off the inn-servant’s shoulder, he used it to rub every part of his plump face, beginning behind his ears, after twice snorting straight into the inn-servant’s face as a preliminary.”

— Nikolai Gogol

75. “But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.”

— Nikolai Gogol

76. “One cannot expect men not to get drunk when there is nothing to do!”

— Nikolai Gogol

77. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

78. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

79. “But nothing is lasting in this world. Even joy begins to fade after only one minute. Two minutes later, and it is weaker still, until finally it is swallowed up in our everyday, prosaic state of mind, just as a ripple made by a pebble gradually merges with the smooth surface of the water.”

— Nikolai Gogol

80. “It is almost impossible to express the extraordinary silence that came over everyone whose eyes were fixed on the painting––not a rustle, not a sound; and the painting meanwhile appeared loftier and loftier with every minute; brightly and wonderfully it detached itself from everything, and all transformed finally into one instant––the fruit of a thought that had flown down to the artist from heaven––an instant for which the whole of human life is only a preparation.”

— Nikolai Gogol

81. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

82. “There are people who exist in this world not like entities but like the speckles or spots on something.”

— Nikolai Gogol

83. “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!”

— Nikolai Gogol

84. “I tell everyone very plainly that I take bribes, but what kind of bribes? Why, greyhound puppies. That’s a totally different matter.”

— Nikolai Gogol

85. “Take any man you like of the persons whom you thus term rascals. That man none the less remains a human being. That being so, how can one refuse to defend him when all the time one knows that half his errors have been committed through ignorance and stupidity? Each of us commits faults with every step that we take; each of us entails unhappiness upon others with every breath that we draw – and that although we may have no evil intention whatever in our minds.”

— Nikolai Gogol

86. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

87. “Oh, I cannot understand these points – absolutely I cannot. And the strangest, most unintelligible fact of all is that authors actually can select such occurrences for their subject! I confess this too to pass my comprehension, to -But no; I will say just that I do not understand it. In the first place, a course of the sort never benefits the country. And in the second place – in the second place, a course of the sort never benefits anything at all. I cannot divine the use of it.”

— Nikolai Gogol

88. “Well, so that’s the prosecutor! He lived and lived, and then died! And they will say in the papers that he died to the regret of his staff and all mankind, a respected citizen, a rare father, a model husband, and they will write a lot more stuff and nonsense about him; they will add, maybe, that he was mourned by widows and orphans; but if one were to investigate the matter thoroughly, it will emerge that he had nothing to him except his bushy eyebrows.”

— Nikolai Gogol

89. “In the department of – but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service.”

— Nikolai Gogol

90. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

91. “You can always tell a pig by its grunt.”

— Nikolai Gogol

92. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

93. “Despair at not reaching ideal perfection are among the reasons given. Again it is said.”

— Nikolai Gogol

94. “I really don’t know,” the old lady brought out hesitatingly, “you see I’ve never sold the dead before.”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

98. “For public opinion does not admit that lofty rapturous laughter is worthy to stand beside lofty lyrical emotion and that there isall the difference in the world between it and the antics of a clown at a fair.”

— Nikolai Gogol

99. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

100. “Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young.”

— Nikolai Gogol