Quotes from Mikhail Lermontov

I can tell you, it's going to end badly; these Asiatics are all like this. After a good pull of young wine, the knife-play begins!' We mounted our horses and galloped home.

Así es la gente! Todos son iguales: conocen de antemano todos los aspectos dañinos de una acción, ayudan, aconsejan e incluso la aprueban, al ver que no hay otro remedio, pero luego se lavan las manos y dan la espalda, con indignación, a quien tuvo el valor de cargar con toda responsabilidad. ¡Todos son así, hasta los más bondadosos, hasta los más inteligentes...!

Women love only those whom they do not know!

Women only love those that they don't know.

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

Love, like fire, goes out without fuel.

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

We practically always excuse things when we understand them

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.

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

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

Tell me," she finally whispered, "is it fun for you to torture me? . . . I should really hate you. Ever since we have known each other, you have given me nothing but suffering . . ." Her voice trembled, she leaned toward me, and lowered her head onto my breast. "Perhaps," I thought, "this is exactly why you loved me: joys are forgotten, but sadness, never . . .

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

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.

I am not capable of true friendship. One of the two friends is always the slave of the other, although, often, neither of the two admits this to himself.

Women only love those that they don't know.

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.

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!

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

Oh vanity! You are the lever with which Archimedes wanted to raise the earthly globe!

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.

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