Gogol Dead Souls Quotes & Sayings

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. — Lev Shestov

By 1969, when I celebrated 45 years in the music business, I also had 45 people in our musical family. — Lawrence Welk

I have never considered myself a prodigy. Others have used that term, but I never bought in to it. — Joshua Waitzkin

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

One Buddha is not enough; we need to have many Buddhas. — Nhat Hanh

Women have always been at the forefront of progressive movements. Women can be depended on when you need bodies in the streets for women's rights and human rights. — Martha Plimpton

Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense. — George Friedman

Perhaps you can relate to feeling in the middle, to having questions in the air. I don't know about you, but I hope to live a good story. To see things invisible and watch them come to life. The critics will probably always be there calling us fools or crooks, but we should just keep going. They can't see what we see and the are not the thing that drives us. — Jamie Tworkowski

There are passions that it is not for man to choose. — Nikolai Gogol

Being born in a Christian home does not make you a Christian. — E. Stanley Jones

I think what all of us have in common is that we've been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. That's a core reason why women do not have power in the world. — Eve Ensler

Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls. — Vladimir Nabokov

My primary and secondary education was in French, which had a lasting influence on my life. — Baruj Benacerraf

This is my dilemma. I'm a guy who makes things up as I go along, so nothing is ever finished - there are so many layers. So when you solo, yeah, you might get into one thing, but then, hey, everything has implications! You can hear the next level. And that's how I feel about improvising - there's always another level. — Sonny Rollins

A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe. — Nikolai Gogol

I'm grateful to you, Jonas, because without you I would never have figured out a way to bring about the change. But your role now is to escape. And my role is to stay. — Lois Lowry

What's it like here?
There's a biscuit factory next door. We get the broken ones. — Hiedi Thomas Jennifer Worth

My parents had an independent theater company here in Sweden during the 1980s, so I was raised watching my parents create independently, having a lot of fun and just doing what they wanted to do. I think that idea of independence as an artist was something I was always used to. And then I entered the industry from a very commercial perspective, and things were very different then from what I grew up with. — Robyn

Nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book ... — Nikolai Gogol