Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero of Our Time (1840)

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mikhail Lermontov
The love of savages isn't much better than the love of noble ladies; ignorance and simple-heartedness can be as tiresome as coquetry.

Mikhail Lermontov
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.

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 lying, but I wanted to rouse him. I have an inborn urge to contradict; my whole life has been a mere chain of sad and futile opposition to the dictates of either heart or reason. The presence of an enthusiast makes me as cold as a midwinter's day, and, I believe, frequent association with a listless phlegmatic would make me an impassioned dreamer.

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

Mikhail Lermontov
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.

Mikhail Lermontov
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.

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
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
You men do not understand the delights of a glance, of a pressure of the hand... but as for me, I swear to you that, when I listen to your voice, I feel such a deep, strange bliss that the most passionate kisses could not take its place.

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

Mikhail Lermontov
Ever since I lived and entered into action, fate has somehow led me to the climax of other people's dramas...I have always been the essential character of the fifth act.

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
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.

Mikhail Lermontov
A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman's heart in particular.

Mikhail Lermontov