Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
7 quotes
"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."
"You see, wisdom does not come with grey hairs."
"Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young."
"A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe."
"The human feelings, which had never been very deep in him, grew shallower every hour, and every day something more dropped away from the decrepit wreck."
"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."
"Seek ye not riches, seek but the society of good men."