Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

After he is gone, his thin little heirs once again, in the time-honoured Russian way, gallop through the paternal fortune at full tilt.

A life of solitude provided rich food for avarice, which, as we know, has the appetite of a wolf, and the more it devours, the more insatiable it becomes.

Numberless as the sands of the sea are the passions of man, and none is like any other, and all of them, the base and the beautiful, in the beginning are submissive to man, and only later do they establish a terrible tyranny over him.