Kozma Prutkov Quotes

If you want to be happy, be so.

When casting pebbles into water, look at the ripples being formed thereby. Otherwise this activity will be an empty amusement.

If you read the inscription "buffalo" on an elephant's cage, do not believe your eyes.

half-a-million-strong procession from the windows, or when stepping out on to Nevsky Prospect: there was something terrible about it. The terrible thing was how organized it was, how, at the appointed time on the appointed day, half a million or even more Petersburg residents had paraded along the prescribed streets, in the prescribed direction, in the prescribed ranks—which was quite unnatural! And the singing! Exactly the same songs in a hundred or so different columns, and—the way they were singing! It was monotonous, as if under some compulsion, under a spell: the sound of a new paganism. One of the library’s wits, putting a twist on Kozma Prutkov, had quipped: “Tell me this, if the color red didn’t exist, how would you spot the friends of the people?” The woman in charge of issuing the books: “There’s nothing funny about it. This is the very Acheron flowing—