Mikhail Lermontov Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Mikhail Lermontov
The chain of young life is broken,
The journey is ended, the hour has struck, it is time to leave,
Time to go where there is no future,
No past, no eternity, no years;
Where there are no expectations, no passions,
No bitter tears, no fame, no honour;
Where memory sleeps deeply
And the heart in its narrow coffin home
Does not feel the worm gnawing it.

Mikhail Lermontov
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.

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

Mikhail Lermontov
And I, as I lived, in an alien land
Will die a slave and an orphan.

Mikhail Lermontov
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.

Mikhail Lermontov
I was born, so that the whole world could be a spectator
Of my triumph or my doom...

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

Mikhail Lermontov
The surrounding forest, as though in a mist,
Was blue in the powder of smoke.
But there, far off, in a disordered ridge,
Which was yet eternally proud and calm,
Stretched the mountains — and Kazbek
Gleamed with its sharp peak.
And with secret, heartfelt sorrow
I thought: 'Pitiable man.
What does he want! The sky is clear,
Beneath it there is much room for all,
But constantly and vainly
He alone wages war — why?'

Mikhail Lermontov
Of two close friends, one is always the slave of the other.

Mikhail Lermontov
Out of life's storm I carried only a few ideas - and not one feeling.

Mikhail Lermontov
A solitary sail that rises
White in the blue mist on the foam —
What is it in far lands it prizes?
What does it leave behind at home?

Mikhail Lermontov
In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.

Mikhail Lermontov
For what did the creator prepare me,
Why did he so terribly contradict
The hopes of my youth?...

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

Mikhail Lermontov
I was involuntarily struck by the aptitude which the Russian displays for accommodating himself to the customs of the people in whose midst he happens to be living. I know not whether this mental quality is deserving of censure or commendation, but it proves the incredible pliancy of his mind and the presence of that clear common sense which pardons evil wherever it sees that evil is inevitable or impossible of annihilation.

Mikhail Lermontov
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.

Mikhail Lermontov
A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is indeed a portrait, but not of a single individual; it is a portrait composed of all the vices of our generation in the fullness of their development.

Mikhail Lermontov
My love had grown one with my soul; it became darker, but did not go out

Mikhail Lermontov
And everything that he saw before him
He despised or hated.

Mikhail Lermontov
... man, this ruler over general evil,
With a perfidious heart, with a lying tongue...

Mikhail Lermontov
Beneath, the azure current floweth,
Above, the golden sunlight glows.
Rebellious, the storms it wooeth,
As if the storms could give repose.

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

Mikhail Lermontov
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.

Mikhail Lermontov