Mikhail Lermontov Quotes
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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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I love enemies, though not in the Christian way. They amuse me, excite my blood. Being always on one’s guard, catching every glance, the significance of every word, guessing at intentions, frustrating their plots, pretending to be tricked, and suddenly, with a shove, upturning the whole enormous and arduously built edifice of their cunning and schemes—that’s what I call life.
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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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An unusual beginning must have an unusual end.
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Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there.
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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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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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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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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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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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Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.
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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.
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If only people thought a little more about it, they would see that life is not worrying about so much.