Top 50 Mikhail Lermontov Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

3. “Love, like fire, goes out without fuel.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

6. “Happiness comes the way the wind blows.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

7. “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.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

8. “What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. 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

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

10. “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

11. “An unusual beginning must have an unusual end.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

14. “Out of life’s storm I carried only a few ideas – and not one feeling.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

16. “We almost always forgive those we understand.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

17. “The story of a man’s soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation, especially if it is based on the self-analysis of a mature mind and is written with no vain desire to rouse our sympathy and curiosity. The problem with Rousseau’s Confessions is that he read them to his friends.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

18. “I have an innate passion for contradiction – my whole life has been nothing but a series of melancholy and vain contradictions of heart or reason.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

19. “My soul has been spoiled by the world, my imagination is unquiet, my heart insatiate. To me everything is of little moment. I become as easily accustomed to grief as to joy, and my life grows emptier day by day. One expedient only is left to me – travel.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

20. “I realized that there was no point or sense in chasing after happiness that had perished.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

21. “Of two friends one is always the slave of the other, though often neither will admit it.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

24. “Women love only those whom they do not know!”

— Mikhail Lermontov

25. “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

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

27. “I have carried only a few ideas out of life’s storm – and not one feeling. I have long lived according to the head, not the heart. I consider and analyze my personal passions and actions with a strict curiosity, but without sympathy. There are two people within me: one who lives in the full sense of the word, and the other who reasons and judges him.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

28. “Whether I am a fool or a villain I know not; but this is certain, I am also most deserving of pity – perhaps more than she. My soul has been spoiled by the world, my imagination is unquiet, my heart insatiate. To me everything is of little moment. I become as easily accustomed to grief as to joy, and my life grows emptier day by day.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

29. “A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman’s heart in particular.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

30. “Note, my good doctor,” said I, “that without fools, society would be a very tiresome place!”

— Mikhail Lermontov

31. “Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

32. “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

33. “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

34. “I have a congenital desire to contradict; my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind. When faced with enthusiasm, I am seized by a midwinter freeze, and I suppose that frequent dealings with sluggish phlegmatics would have made a passionate dreamer.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

35. “In people’s eyes I readPages of malice and sin.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

37. “Do what you will, the heart hardens and the soul shrinks in upon itself.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

38. “I prefer to doubt everything. Such a disposition does not preclude a resolute character. On the contrary, as far as I am concerned, I always advance more boldly when I don’t know what is waiting me for me. After all, nothing worse than death can happen-and death you can’t escape!”

— Mikhail Lermontov

39. “His face blazed, and his eyes began to glitter. “Fine!” he replied. “I despise myself, and I hate you. If you don’t kill me, I’ll cut your throat one night around some corner. There isn’t room on this earth for both of us.” I fired. When the smoke had cleared, Grushnitsky was not on the ledge. Only a light column of dust was still whirling on the edge of the precipice. Everyone shouted in unison. “Finita la comedia!”25 I told the doctor.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

40. “Les joies s’oublient, les peines jamais.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

42. “I have observed that there always exists some strange relationship between the appearance of a man and his soul, as if with the loss of a limb, the soul lost one of its senses.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

43. “Anyone who has chanced like me to roam through desolate mountains and studied at length their fantastic shapes and drunk the invigorating air of their valleys can understand why I wish to describe and depict these magic scenes for others.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

44. “No good ever becomes of a man who forgets an old friend.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

45. “Oh vanity! You are the lever with which Archimedes wanted to raise the earthly globe!”

— Mikhail Lermontov

46. “And then we had one of those conversations which make no sense on paper, which you can’t repeat and can’t even remember. The sounds mean more than the words, like in an Italian opera.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

47. “We practically always excuse things when we understand them.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

48. “If I had even been his friend, well and good: the artful indiscretion of the true friend is intelligible to everybody; but I only saw Pechorin once in my life – on the high-road – and, consequently, I cannot cherish towards him that inexplicable hatred, which, hiding its face under the mask of friendship, awaits but the death or misfortune of the beloved object to burst over its head in a storm of reproaches, admonitions, scoffs and regrets.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

49. “There is no feminine gaze that I would not forget at the sight of mountains covered with curly vegetation, and illumined by the southern sun, at the sight of the blue sky, or at the sound of a torrent that falls from crag to crag.”

— Mikhail Lermontov

50. “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 egoistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment.”

— Mikhail Lermontov