Nikolai Gogol

Each of them believes if he is annoyed in any way, that the whole official class is insulted in his person.

Curious that in enlightened Russia so many people cannot even take a meal at an inn without chattering to the attendant and making free with him!

Why, you might gallop three years away from here and reach nowhere.

Thoma Grigorovitch had one very strange eccentricity: to the day of his death he never liked to tell the same thing twice.

However many of his superiors might come and go, he was always seen in the same spot, in the same attitude, busy with the same work, and bearing the same title; so that people began to believe he had come into the world just as he was, with his bald forehead and official uniform.

Likewise there lay in his study a book with the fourteenth page permanently turned down.

Our rule is: the nearer to nature the better.

How oddly things go on in this world of ours! Every one who lives in it endeavours to copy and ape his neighbour.

While he copied official documents, a world of varied beauty rose before his eyes.

Without a friend, what are all the treasures in the world?

I tell everyone plainly that I take bribes. I make no bones about it.

But, in accordance with the primitive arrangement of things, the most trifling causes produce the greatest events, and the grandest undertakings end in the most insignificant results.

He was fully conscious of his dignity, and of the gulf which separates the tailor who only repairs old clothes from the artist who makes new ones.

More than one respected statesman reveals himself, when confronted with a business matter, to be just such another as Madam Korobotchka, in that, once he has got an idea into his head, there is no getting it out of him⁠—you may ply him with daylight-clear arguments, yet they will rebound from his brain as an india-rubber ball rebounds from a flagstone.

Too much brain is sometimes worse than none at all.

Which wields the most powerful sway over us, passion or habit?

But my conscience is a little uneasy that I have not yet given any detailed information about Ivan Jakovlevitch, an estimable man in many ways.

In short, they generally begin well, but always end badly.

Yes, it’s a mysterious law of fate. Your clever man is either a drunkard, or he makes such grimaces that you feel like running away.

You would like to hide them both under your petticoat, and sit upon them as a hen sits on eggs.