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 Copy Share Image
it's not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments.… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
“What a strange creature man is! He does not believe in God, but he does believe that if the bridge of is nose itches… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
“Our century is so shallow, its desires scattered so widely, our knowledge so encyclopedic, that we are absolutely unable to focus our designs on… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
I ask everyone in Russia to pray for me, beginning with the bishops, whose whole life is a single prayer. I ask prayers also… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
Go along, go along quickly, and set all you have on the table for us. We don't want doughnuts, honey buns, poppy cakes, and… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
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… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share
“It seemed that both had lately had a touch of that pain under the waistband which comes of a sedentary life.” — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
...how much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners... — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
Russia! Russia... Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share Image
“The fair-haired man was one of those people in whose character there is at first sight a certain obstinacy. Before you can open your mouth, they are already prepared to argue and, it seems, will never agree to anything that is clearly contrary to their way of thinking, will never call a stupid thing smart, and in particular will never… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share
“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… — Nikolai Gogol Copy Share
