Quotes by Nikolai Gogol

Tomorrow at seven oclock 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. Im surprised England doesnt pay attention to this. Its 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 thats why theres a terrible stench all over the earth, so that you have to hold your nose. And thats why the moon itself is such a delicate sphere that people cant live on it, and now only noses live there. And for the same reason, we cant see our own noses, for theyre all in the moon.

To what nadir of paltriness , pettiness, and squalor a man can sink! How could he change so! But is this really true to life? ---It is, its all true to life, for anything can happen to a man. Your ardent youth of today would recoil in horror if you were to show him his own portrait as an old man. Once you set off on lifes journey, once you take your leave of those gentle years of youth and enter the harsh, embittering years of manhood, remember to keep with you all your human emotions, do not leave them by the wayside, for you will not pick them up again! Grim and terrible is the old age which awaits us, and nothing does it give in return! The grave itself is more merciful than old age, for at least on the gravestone you will find written the words: Here a man lies buried! but in the cold, unfeeling features of inhuman old age you can read nothing.

In this world, people always find a way of doing what they want

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 artists work, however terrible its chosen subject; here there was some morbid, anguished feeling. What is it? the artist asked himself involuntarily. Its 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?

There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.

He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawks eye or the falcons 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.

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.

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

Dont blame the mirror if your face is faulty.

...all this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us.

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

Everywhere across whatever sorrows of which our life is woven, some radiant joy will gaily flash past.

Let me warn you, if you start chasing after views, youll be left without bread and without views.

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

“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.”

“What a strange creature man is! He does not believe in God, but he does believe that if the bridge of his nose itches he is surely going to die; he disdains to read the creation of a poet, as clear as day and imbued with harmony and the lofty wisdom of simplicity, yet he pounces eagerly on a book in which some know-all has churned everything up, spun a lot of nonsense, bent and twisted nature inside out. He thinks this book is marvelous and he shouts from the rooftops: This is it, these are the true facts of the mysteries of the heart!”