The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol Quotes

“He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else. Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday clothes the spots do not show.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“What grief is not taken away by time? What passion will survive an unequal battle with it? I knew a man in the bloom of his still youthful powers, filled with true nobility and virtue, I knew him when he was in love, tenderly, passionately, furiously, boldly, modestly, and before me, almost before my eyes, the object of his passion - tender, beautiful as an angel - was struck down by insatiable death. I never saw such terrible fits of inner suffering, such furious scorching anguish, such devouring despair as shook the unfortunate lover. I never thought a man could create such a hell for himself, in which there would be no shadow, no image, nothing in the least resembling hope... They tried to keep an eye on him; they hid all instruments he might have used to take his own life. Two weeks later he suddenly mastered himself: he began to laugh, to joke; freedom was granted him, and the first thing he did was buy a pistol. One day his family was terribly frightened by the sudden sound of a shot. They ran into the room and saw him lying with his brains blown out. A doctor who happened to be there, whose skill was on everyone's lips, saw signs of life in him, found that the wound was not quite mortal, and the man, to everyone's amazement, was healed. The watch on him was increased still more. Even at the table they did not give him a knife to and tried to take away from him anything that he might strike himself with; but a short while later he found a new occasion and threw himself under the wheels of a passing carriage. His arms and legs were crushed; but again they saved him. A year later I saw him in a crowded room; he sat at the card table gaily saying 'Petite ouverte,' keeping one card turned down, and behind him, leaning on the back of his chair, stood his young wife, who was sorting through his chips.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“And long afterwards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: "Let me be. Why do you offend me?" --and in these penetrating words rang other words: "I am your brother." And the poor young man would bury his face in his hands, and many a time in his life he shuddered to see how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savege coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners, and God! even in a man the world regards as noble and honorable.”
― Gogol Nicolai, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“His life had already touched upon the age when everything that breathes of impulse shrinks in a man, when a powerful bow has a fainter effect on his soul and no longer twines piercing music around his heart, when the touch of beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burnt-out feelings become more accessible to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little allow it imperceptibly to lull them completely. Fame cannot give pleasure to one who did not merit it but stole it; it produces a constant tremor only in one who is worthy of it. And therefore all his feelings and longings turn toward gold.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawk's eye or the falcon's gaze of a cavalry officer. The reason for that is that he sees, at one and the same time, both your features and those of some plaster Hercules standing in his room, or else he imagines a painting of his own that he still means to produce. That is why his responses are often incoherent, not to the point, and the muddle of things in his head increases his timidity all the more.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“A swishing is often heard in the Carpathians, the sound as of a thousand mill wheels turning in the water. It is the dead men gnawing at the dead man, in the abyss without issue, which no man has ever seen, fearing to pass near it. It happens not seldom in the world that the earth shakes from one end to the other: learned people say it is because somewhere by the sea there is a mountain out of which flames burst and burning rivers flow. But the old men who live in Hungary and the land of Galicia know better and say that the earth shakes because there is a dead man grown great and huge in it who wants to rise.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“Truth to tell, it was a bit difficult for him at first to get used to such limitations, but later it somehow became a habit and went better; he even accustomed himself to going entirely without food in the evenings; but instead he was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat. From then on it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he were married, as if some other person were there with him, as if he were not alone but some pleasant life's companion had agreed to walk down the path of life with him––and this companion was none other than that same overcoat with its cotton-wool quilting, with its sturdy lining that knew no wear.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“This was no longer art: it even destroyed the harmony of the portrait itself. They were alive, they were human eyes! It seemed as if they had been cut out of a living man and set there. Here there was not that lofty pleasure which comes over the soul at the sight of an artist's work, however terrible its chosen subject; here there was some morbid, anguished feeling. 'What is it?' the artist asked himself involuntarily. 'It's nature all the same, its living nature––why, then, this strangely unpleasant feeling? Or else the slavish, literal imitation of nature is already a trespass and seems like a loud, discordant cry?”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“Tomorrow at seven o'clock a strange phenomenon will occur: the earth is going to sit on the moon. This has also been written about by the noted English chemist Wellington. I confess, I felt troubled at heart when I pictured to myself the extraordinary delicacy and fragility of the moon. For the moon is usually made in Hamburg, and made quite poorly. I'm surprised England doesn't pay attention to this. It's made by a lame cooper, and one can see that the fool understands nothing about the moon. He used tarred rope and a quantity of cheap olive oil, and that's why there's a terrible stench all over the earth, so that you have to hold your nose. And that's why the moon itself is such a delicate sphere that people can't live on it, and now only noses live there. And for the same reason, we can't see our own noses, for they're all in the moon.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“Yet the important person, perfectly satisfied, incidentally, with domestic family tendernesses, found it suitable to have a lady for friendly relations in another part of the city. This lady friend was no whit better or younger than his wife; but there exist such riddles in the world, and it is not our business to judge of them.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all:”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“It’s all either kammerjunker or general. All that’s best in the world, all of it goes either to kammerjunkers or generals. You find a poor treasure for yourself, hope to reach out your hand to it—a kammerjunker or a general plucks it away from you. Devil take it! I wish I could become a general myself: not so as to get her hand and the rest of it, no, I want to be a general simply to see how they’ll fawn and perform all those various courtly tricks and equivocations, and then to tell them I spit on them both.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“I’m only forty-two—the age at which service just seriously begins.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“Everything is deception, everything is a dream, everything is not what it seems to be!”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“Though stupidity constitutes a special charm in a pretty wife. I, at least, have known many husbands who are delighted with their wives’ stupidity and see in it all the tokens of childlike innocence. 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, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“God, what is our life! An eternal discord between dream and reality!”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

“It would be better if you didn’t exist, didn’t live in the world, but were the creation of an inspired artist! I would never leave the canvas, I would eternally gaze at you and kiss you. I would live and breathe by you, as the most beautiful dream, and then I would be happy. My desires could reach no further. I would call upon you as my guardian angel, before sleep and waking, and I would wait for you whenever I had to portray the divine and holy.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol