“ Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord. ”
I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.
~ Nikolai Gogol
The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.
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.
