Mikhail Lermontov Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage.

It is sad to see a young man's fondest hopes and dreams shattered when the rose-colured veil is plucked away and he sees the actions and feelings of men for what they are. But he still has the hope of replacing his old illusions with others, just as fleeting, but also just as sweet.

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.

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

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

There are two men in me--one lives in the full sense of the word, the other reasons and passes judgment on the first. The first will perhaps take leave of you and the world forever in an hour now; and the second . . . the second?

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

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.

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 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.

Women only love those that they don’t know.

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

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

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.

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

We practically always excuse things when we understand them

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.

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