Nikolai Makaveli Quotes

In his mind, nothing could be more delightful than to live in solitude, and enjoy the spectacle of nature, and sometimes read some book or other. ~ Nikolai Gogol

GOVERNOR. And then I must call your attention to the history teacher. He has a lot of learning in his head and a store of facts. That's evident. But he lectures with such ardor that he quite forgets himself. Once I listened to him. As long as he was talking about the Assyrians and Babylonians, it was not so bad. But when he reached Alexander of Macedon, I can't describe what came over him. Upon my word, I thought a fire had broken out. He jumped down from the platform, picked up a chair and dashed it to the floor. Alexander of Macedon was a hero, it is true. But that's no reason for breaking chairs. The state must bear the cost. ~ Nikolai Gogol

What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it, like the road leading to a magnificent dwelling meant for a king's mansion! Broader and more splendid than all other roads it is, lit by the sun and illumined all night by lamps, yet people have flowed past it in the blind darkness. So many times already, though guided by a sense come down from heaven, they have managed to waver and go astray, have managed in broad daylight to get again into an impassable wilderness, have managed again to blow a blinding fog into each other's eyes, and, dragging themselves after marsh-lights, have managed finally to reach the abyss, only to ask one another in horror: where is the way out, where is the path? ~ Nikolai Gogol

History is not an objective empirical datum, it is a myth. ~ Nikolai A. Berdyaev

The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message. ~ Nikolai Gogol

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco. ~ Nikolai Gogol

A quiet room with cockroaches peeping out like prunes from every corner ... ~ Nikolai Gogol

Business was successfully concluded. But - strange is man: he was deeply mortified at being in disfavour with the very people whom he did not respect, and whose vanity and love of dress he derided. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Are we calling it a presence now?" asked Nikolai. "I preferred 'monster.' Or 'demon.' Even 'fiend' has a nice ring. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Being around Nikolai was always like this, watching him shift and change, revealing secrets as he went. He reminded me of the wooden nesting dolls I'd played with as a child. Except instead of getting smaller, he just kept getting grander and more mysterious. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

Whatever you may say, the body depends on the soul. ~ Nikolai Gogol

In this holy russia of ours everything is infected by a mania for imitation, and everyone apes his superior ~ Nikolai Gogol

Say something spiteful."
"Why?" she asked faintly.
"Because I'm fairly certain I'm hallucinating and in my dreams you're much nicer."
"You're an idiot, Nikolai. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Despair at not reaching ideal perfection are among the reasons given. Again it is said ~ Nikolai Gogol

And could a man sink to such triviality, such meanness, such nastiness? Could he change so much? And is it true to life? Yes, it is all true to life. All this can happen to a man. The ardent youth of today would start back in horror if you could show him his portrait in old age. As you pass from the soft years of youth into harsh, hardening manhood, be sure you take with you on the way all the humane emotions, do not leave them on the road: you will not pick them up again afterwards! ~ Nikolai Gogol

Mathematical theories have sometimes been used to predict phenomena that were not confirmed until years later. For example, Maxwell's equations, named after physicist James Clerk Maxwell, predicted radio waves. Einstein's field equations suggested that gravity would bend light and that the universe is expanding. Physicist Paul Dirac once noted that the abstract mathematics we study now gives us a glimpse of physics in the future. In fact, his equations predicted the existence of antimatter, which was subsequently discovered. Similarly, mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky said that "there is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world. ~ Clifford A. Pickover

I may not have been completely honest about that."
"You? Less than truthful? I'm shocked, Nikolai. Shocked and horrified. ~ Leigh Bardugo

The Russian Intelligentsia is a quite special and peculiar thing; as a spiritual and a social form it existed only in Russia. The Intelligentsia was an idealistic class, a class of people wholly influenced by ideas and ready to face prison, hard labour and death for the sake of their ideas ~ Nikolai A. Berdyaev

What is stronger in us - passion or habit? Or are all the violent impulses, all the whirl of our desires and turbulent passions, only the consequence of our ardent age, and is it only through youth that they seem deep and shattering? ~ Nikolai Gogol

You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays. The things these scribblers write! ~ Nikolai Gogol

People were always ready to yield their
wills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chance
for developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the great
nineteenth-century Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky ~ Ernest Becker

He would not beg Zoya to stay. It was not in his nature to plead with anyone, and that was not the pact they shared. They did not look to each other for comfort. They kept each other marching. They kept each other strong. So he would not find another excuse to get her talking again. He would not tell her he was afraid to be left alone with the thing he might become, and he would not ask her to leave the lamp burning, a child's bit of magic to ward off the dark.
But he was relieved when she did it anyway. ~ Leigh Bardugo

We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Take any man you like of the persons whom you thus term rascals. That man none the less remains a human being. That being so, how can one refuse to defend him when all the time one knows that half his errors have been committed through ignorance and stupidity? Each of us commits faults with every step that we take; each of us entails unhappiness upon others with every breath that we draw - and that although we may have no evil intention whatever in our minds. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Have you even held a command? Nikolai asked. I'd once led a seminar of junior mapmakers, but I didn't think that was what he meant. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

But until now I did not understand; everything was in a sort of mist. And I believe it all arose from believing that the brain is in the head. It's not so at all; it comes with the wind from the direction of the Caspian Sea. ~ Nikolai Gogol

To tell about him, one should be French, because only the people of that nation manage to explain to others what they don't understand themselves. ~ Nikolai Leskov

Every man who has lived in the world and mixed with his fellow men will have remarked something which has remained hidden from the eyes of others; ~ Nikolai Gogol

When she scooped up her clothes, opened his door, then snapped her fingers for a guard down the hall, Wroth watched like a bystander.
"Pssst. Minion. I need these laundered. Very little starch. Don't just stand there gawking or you'll anger my good frenemy General Wroth. We're like this."
He couldn't see her but knew she was twining two fingers together. ~ Kresley Cole

Oh, I cannot understand these points - absolutely I cannot. And the strangest, most unintelligible fact of all is that authors actually can select such occurrences for their subject! I confess this too to pass my comprehension, to -But no; I will say just that I do not understand it. In the first place, a course of the sort never benefits the country. And in the second place - in the second place, a course of the sort never benefits anything at all. I cannot divine the use of it. ~ Nikolai Gogol

In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet make no advance from that state in which it came to us from Euclid.
As belonging to these imperfections, I consider the obscurity in the fundamental concepts of the geometrical magnitudes and in the manner and method of representing the measuring of these magnitudes, and finally the momentous gap in the theory of parallels, to fill which all efforts of mathematicians have so far been in vain. ~ Nikolai Lobachevsky

But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life. ~ Nikolai Gogol

His whole being, his whole life was awakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again. The blindfold suddenly fell from his eyes. God! to ruin the best years of his youth so mercilessly; to destroy, to extinguish the spark of fire that had perhaps flickered in his breast, that perhaps would have developed by now into greatness and beauty, that perhaps would also have elicited tears of amazement and gratitude! ~ Nikolai Gogol

I think fatigue suits you, Zoya. The pallor. The shadows beneath your eyes. You look like a heroine in a novel. "
"I look like a woman about to step on your foot. "
"Now, now. You're managing remarkably well. And the smiling hasn't killed you yet."
"Yet. ~ Leigh Bardugo