Mikhail Lermontov Quotes
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Out of life's storm I carried only a few ideas - and not one feeling.
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Anyone who has chanced like me to roam through desolate mountains and studied at length their fantastic shapes and drunk the invigorating air of their valleys can understand why I wish to describe and depict these magic scenes for others.
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An unusual beginning must have an unusual end.
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What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.
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When we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.
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There are two men in me--one lives in the full sense of the word, the other reasons and passes judgment on the first. The first will perhaps take leave of you and the world forever in an hour now; and the second . . . the second?
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The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends.
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Women love only those whom they do not know!
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Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning.
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One should never spurn a penitent criminal: in his despair he may become twice as much a criminal as before.
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Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage.
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If only people thought a little more about it, they would see that life is not worrying about so much.
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Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.
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In people's eyes I read Pages of malice and sin.
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I am like a mariner born and bred on board a buccaneer brig whose soul has become so inured to storm and strife that if cast ashore he would weary and languish no matter how alluring the shady groves and how bright the gentle sun.
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We almost always forgive those we understand.
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I have a congenital desire to contradict; my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind. When faced with enthusiasm, I am seized by a midwinter freeze, and I suppose that frequent dealings with sluggish phlegmatics would have made a passionate dreamer.