Top 200 Nikolai Gogol Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “He was an artist of rare ability, a self-taught artist, without teachers or schools, principles and rules, carried away only by the thirst for perfection, and treading a path indicated by his own instincts, for reasons unknown, perchance, even to himself. Through some lofty and secret instinct he perceived the presence of a soul in every object.”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

103. “I shall think soon that what people say is true: every woman is possessed by her own peculiar devil of curiosity.”

— Nikolai Gogol

104. “They were terrified out of their wits, the devil knows why: they take you for a brigand and a spy. And the prosecutor has died of fright; the funeral is to-morrow. Won’t you be there?”

— Nikolai Gogol

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

— Nikolai Gogol

106. “The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities.”

— Nikolai Gogol

107. “And could a man sink to such triviality, such meanness, such nastiness? Could he change so much? And is it true to life? Yes, it is all true to life. All this can happen to a man. The ardent youth of today would start back in horror if you could show him his portrait in old age. As you pass from the soft years of youth into harsh, hardening manhood, be sure you take with you on the way all the humane emotions, do not leave them on the road: you will not pick them up again afterwards!”

— Nikolai Gogol

108. “His whole being, his whole life was awakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again. The blindfold suddenly fell from his eyes. God! to ruin the best years of his youth so mercilessly; to destroy, to extinguish the spark of fire that had perhaps flickered in his breast, that perhaps would have developed by now into greatness and beauty, that perhaps would also have elicited tears of amazement and gratitude!”

— Nikolai Gogol

109. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

110. “My heart is beating as though it were waiting for something.”

— Nikolai Gogol

111. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

112. “Oh long-drawn highway, how excellent you are! How often have I in weariness and despondency set forth upon your length, and found in you salvation and rest! How often, as I followed your leading, have I been visited with wonderful thoughts and poetic dreams and curious, wild impressions!”

— Nikolai Gogol

113. “Certain persons in the world exist, not as personalities in themselves, but as spots or specks on the personalities of others. Always they are to be seen sitting in the same place, and holding their heads at exactly the same angle, so that one comes within an ace of mistaking them for furniture, and thinks to oneself that never since the day of their birth can they have spoken a single word.”

— Nikolai Gogol

114. “He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation.”

— Nikolai Gogol

115. “How strangely are things compounded! In a trice may joy turn to sorrow, should one halt long enough over it: in a trice only God can say what ideas may strike one.”

— Nikolai Gogol

116. “It is well-known that there are many faces in the world over the finishing of which nature did not take much trouble, did not employ any fine tools such as files, gimlets, and so on, but simply hacked them out with round strokes: one chop-a nose appears; another chop-lips appear; eyes are scooped out with a big drill; and she lets it go into the world rough-hewn, saing: “ALIVE!”

— Nikolai Gogol

117. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

118. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

119. “He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings.”

— Nikolai Gogol

120. “In conclusion, the visitor took out a cambric pocket-handkerchief, and sneezed into it with a vehemence wholly new to Tientietnikov’s experience. In fact, the sneeze rather resembled the note which, at times, the trombone of an orchestra appears to utter not so much from its proper place on the platform as from the immediate neighbourhood of the listener’s ear.”

— Nikolai Gogol

121. “It must be noted that this Person of Consequence had only lately become a person of consequence, and until recently had been a person of no consequence. Though, indeed, his position even now was not reckoned of consequence in comparison with others of still greater consequence.”

— Nikolai Gogol

122. “In the old man’s face there was nothing very special – save that the chin was so greatly projected that whenever he spoke he was forced to wipe it with a handkerchief to avoid dribbling.”

— Nikolai Gogol

123. “The room into which Ivan Ivanovich stepped was quite dark, because the shutters were closed and the sunbeam that penetrated through a hole in the shutter was broken into rainbow hues and painted upon the opposite wall a multicolored landscape of thatched roofs, trees, and clothes hanging in the yard, but all upside down. This made an uncanny twilight in the whole room.”

— Nikolai Gogol

124. “Here, precisely here, man imitates God: God granted Himself the work of creation, as the highest delight, and He demands that man, too, be a creator of prosperity and the harmonious course of things. And this they call dull!”

— Nikolai Gogol

125. “There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitching of a mean merrymaker.”

— Nikolai Gogol

126. “Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence – and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.”

— Nikolai Gogol

127. “They had an almost irresistible tendency to degenerate into a kind of lolloping amble.”

— Nikolai Gogol

128. “I am very fond of the theatre. If I have only a kopeck in my pocket, I always go there. Most of my fellow-officials are uneducated boors, and never enter a theatre unless one throws free tickets at their head.”

— Nikolai Gogol

129. “Really it tires one to hear you. How come you always to be so cheerful?” “And how come YOU always to be so gloomy?” retorted the host. “How, you ask? Simply because I am so.”

— Nikolai Gogol

130. “The whole group represented a powerful picture: Ivan Nikiforovich standing in the middle of the room in all his unadorned beauty! The woman, her mouth gaping and with a most senseless and fearful look on her face! Ivan Ivanovich with one arm raised aloft, the way Roman tribunes are portrayed! This was an extraordinary moment! a magnificent spectacle! And yet there was only one spectator: this was the boy in the boundless frock coat, who stood quite calmly and cleaned his nose with his finger.”

— Nikolai Gogol

131. “All this has for me an indescribable charm, perhaps because I no longer see it, and because anything from which we are separated is pleasing to us.”

— Nikolai Gogol

132. “I’d like to peek into the drawing room, where you sometimes see only an open door into yet another room beyond the drawing room.”

— Nikolai Gogol

133. “Emotion has become a disease with you,” said Platon. “You seek your own troubles, and make your own anxieties.”

— Nikolai Gogol

134. “I’ve long suspected dogs of being much smarter than people; I was even certain they could speak, but there was only some kind of stubbornness in them. They’re extraordinary politicians: they notice every human step.”

— Nikolai Gogol

135. “On the twenty-fifth day of March, an extraordinary strange incident occurred in Petersburg.”

— Nikolai Gogol

136. “UTTERLY NONSENSICAL things happen in this world. Sometimes there is absolutely no rhyme or reason in them: suddenly the very nose which had been going around with the rank of a state councillor and created such a stir in the city, found itself again, as though nothing were the matter, in its proper place, that is to say, between the two cheeks of Major Kovalyov.”

— Nikolai Gogol

137. “On first speaking to the man, his ingratiating smile, his flaxen hair, and his blue eyes would lead one to say, “What a pleasant, good-tempered fellow he seems!” yet during the next moment or two one would feel inclined to say nothing at all, and, during the third moment, only to say, “The devil alone knows what he is!”

— Nikolai Gogol

138. “You have to read many books to realize how little you know.”

— Nikolai Gogol

139. “No sooner had the town dropped back than all sort of stuff and nonsense, as is usual with us, began scrawling itself along both sides of the road: tussocks, fir trees, low skimpy stands of young pines, charred trunks of old ones, wild heather, and similar gibberish.”

— Nikolai Gogol

140. “It’s no wonder, however, that somebody would get cold who had knocked about all day in hell, where, as we know, it is not so cold as it is here in winter, and where, a chef’s hat on his head and standing before the hearth like a real cook, he had been roasting sinners with as much pleasure as any woman roasts sausages at Christmas.”

— Nikolai Gogol

141. “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.”

— Nikolai Gogol

142. “For in the book which lies before you, and which, probably, you have read in its first edition, there is portrayed a man who is a type taken from our Russian Empire. This man travels about the Russian land and meets with folk of every condition – from the nobly-born to the humble toiler.”

— Nikolai Gogol

143. “Dio mio, come sei bella, a volte, lunga, lunga strada. Quante volte, come un naufrago che sta per affogare mi sono afferrato a te, e tu ogni volta mi hai raccolto misericordiosa e mi hai salvato! E quante idee meravigliose sono nate in te, quante fantasie poetiche, quante impressioni stupende ho provato!”

— Nikolai Gogol

144. “Fear is more contagious than the plague and is instantly communicated.”

— Nikolai Gogol

145. “Dreadful and fearsome is the old age which will come, for it gives nothing back, nothing in return!”

— Nikolai Gogol

146. “Art has the provinces in its blood. Art is provincial in principle, preserving for itself a naive, external, astonished and envious outlook.”

— Nikolai Gogol

147. “The devil take those who first invented balls!” was his reflection. “Who derives any real pleasure from them? In this province there exist want and scarcity everywhere: yet folk go in for balls! How absurd, too, were those overdressed women! One of them must have had a thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her neighbour.”

— Nikolai Gogol

148. “Yes, readers of this book, none of you really care to see humanity revealed in its nakedness. “Why should we do so?” you say. “What would be the use of it? Do we not know for ourselves that human life contains much that is gross and contemptible? Do we not with our own eyes have to look upon much that is anything but comforting? Far better would it be if you would put before us what is comely and attractive, so that we might forget ourselves a little.”

— Nikolai Gogol

149. “Always a friend or a comrade may fail you, and be the first to desert you in a time of adversity; but never will a KOPECK fail you, whatever may be your plight.”

— Nikolai Gogol

150. “How strangely, how inconceivably our fate plays with us! Do we ever get what we desire? Do we ever achieve that for which our powers seem purposely to prepare us? Everything happens in a contrary way. To this one fate gave wonderful horses, and he drives around indifferently without ever noticing their beauty – while another, whose heart burns with the horse passion, goes on foot and contents himself with merely clicking his tongue as a trotter is led past him.”

— Nikolai Gogol