Mikhail Lermontov Quotes

No, it is not you I love so ardently, The glitter of your beauty is not for me: I love in you my past suffering And my perished youth.

Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning.

Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea.

Farewell, unwashed Russia, Land of slaves, land of masters, And you, blue uniforms, And you, people, devoted to them. Perhaps beyond the wall of the Caucasus, I will hide from your pashas, From their all-seeing eye, From their all-hearing ears.

Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing.

I would make any sacrifice but this; twenty times I can stake my life, even my honour, but my freedom I shall never sell. Why do I prize it so much? … What am I aiming at? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Women! Women! Who can understand them? Their smiles contradict their glances, their words promise and allure, but the tone of their voice repels.

To the earth I gave the earthly tribute Of love, hopes, good and evil; I am ready to begin another life, I am silent and wait: the time has come; I shall leave no brother in this world, And dark and cold embrace My tired soul; Like a premature fruit, deprived of sap, It withered in the storms of fate Under the burning sun of existence.

O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!

I want to reconcile myself with heaven, I want to love, I want to pray, I want to believe in good.

A childish feeling, I admit, but, 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.

One should never spurn a penitent criminal: in his despair he may become twice as much a criminal as before.

The public of this country is so youthful, not to say simple-minded, that it cannot understand the meaning of a fable unless the moral is set forth at the end. Unable to see a joke, insensible to irony, it has, in a word, been badly brought up. It has not yet learned that in a decent book, as in decent society, open invective can have no place; that our present-day civilisation has invented a keener weapon, none the less deadly for being almost invisible, which, under the cloak of flattery, strikes with sure and irresistible effect.

Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although frequently neither acknowledges the fact to himself.

What good are the passions? For sooner or later their sweet sickness ends when reason speaks up;
And life, if surveyed with cold-blooded regard is stupid and empty — a joke.