Mikhail Lermontov Quotes

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

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.

Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there.

He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace.

An unusual beginning must have an unusual end.

We almost always forgive those we understand.

Women love only those whom they do not know!

What is this eternity to me without you? What is the infinity of my domains? Empty ringing words, A spacious temple - without a divinity!

In the first place, [his eyes] never laughed when he laughed. Have you ever noticed this peculiarity some people have? It is either the sign of an evil nature or of a profound and lasting sorrow.

I was born, so that the whole world could be a spectatorOf my triumph or my doom.

If only people thought a little more about it, they would see that life is not worrying about so much.

And I, as I lived, in an alien landWill die a slave and an orphan.

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

We survive on novelty, so much less demanding than commitment.

Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage.

Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.

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

Love, like fire, goes out without fuel.

No good ever becomes of a man who forgets an old friend

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.

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

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

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.

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

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

Women only love those that they don’t know.

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

In people's eyes I readPages of malice and sin.

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

For what did the creator prepare me,Why did he so terribly contradictThe hopes of my youth?

We practically always excuse things when we understand them

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

He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace

The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation