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Mikhail Lermontov QUOTES

Mikhail Lermontov QUOTES

1 " Love, like fire, goes out without fuel. "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

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

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

3 " 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 , A Hero of Our Time

4 " Loneliness

It's Hell for us to draw the fetters
Of life in alienation, stiff.
All people prefer to share gladness,
And nobody - to share grief.

As a king of air, I'm lone here,
The pain lives in my heart, so grim,
And I can see that, to the fear
Of fate, years pass me by like dreams;

And comes again with, touched by gold,
The same dream, gloomy one and old.
I see a coffin, black and sole,
It waits: why to detain the world?

There will be not a sad reflection,
There will be (I am betting on)
Much more gaily celebration
When I am dead, than - born. "

― Mikhail Lermontov

5 " I've an insatiable craving inside me that consumes everything and makes me regard the sufferings and joys of others only in their relationship to me, as food to sustain my spiritual powers. I am no longer capable of loosing my head in love, Ambition has been crushed in me by circumstances, but it has come out in another way, for ambition is nothing but a lust for power and my chief delight is to dominate those around me. To inspire in others love, devotion, fear - isn't that the first symptom and the supreme triumph of power? To cause another person suffering or joy, having no right to do so - isn't that the sweetest food of pride? "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

6 " We practically always excuse things when we understand them "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

7 " I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate. "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

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

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

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

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

10 " 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 , A Hero of Our Time

11 " I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us and the soul becomes anew what it once was and will surely be again "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

12 " 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

13 " I must have had some high object in life, for I feel unbounded strength within me. But I never discovered it and was carried away by the allurements of empty, un-rewarding passions. I was tempered in their flames and came out cold and hard as steel, but I'd lost forever that fire of noble endeavour, that finest flower of life. How many time since then have I been an axe in the hands of fate? Like an engine of execution, I've descended on the heads of the condemned, often without malice, but always without pity. My love has brought no one happiness, for I've never sacrificed a thing for those I've loved. I've loved for myself, for my own pleasure, I've only tried to satisfy a strange inner need. I've fed on their feelings, love, joys and sufferings, and always wanted more. I'm like a starving man who falls asleep exhausted and sees rich food and sparkling wines before him. He rapturously falls on these phantom gifts of the imagination and feels better, but the moment he wakes up his dream disappears and he's left more hungry and desperate than before. "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

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

― Mikhail Lermontov

15 " no good ever comes of a man who forgets an old friend "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

16 " I realized that there was no point or sense in chasing after happiness that had perished. "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

17 " I'm not certain whether I now believe in predestination or not, but that night I firmly believed in it. The proof had been striking, and regardless of the fact that I had ridiculed our forebears and their complacent astrology, I found myself thinking as they did--but I caught myself in time on this dangerous road, and having made it a rule never to reject anything categorically and never to believe in anything blindly, I cast metaphysics aside and began to watch the ground under my feet. "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time

18 " I'm not certain whether I now believe in predestination or not, but that night I firmly believed in it. The proof had been striking, and regardless of the fact that I had ridiculed our forebears and their complacent astrology, I found myself thinking as they did--but I caught myself in time on this dangerous road, and having made it a rule never to reject anything categorically and never to believe in anything blindly, I cast metaphysics aside and began to watch the ground under my feet. Such caution was timely, for I nearly stumbled over something thick and soft but apparently dead. "

― Mikhail Lermontov

19 " No, I'm not Byron, it's my role
To be an undiscovered wonder,
Like him, a persecuted wand'rer,
But furnished with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, sooner ending,
My mind will never reach so high;
Within my soul, beyond the mending,
My shattered aspirations lie:
Dark ocean answer me, can any
Plumb all your depth with skillful trawl?
Who will explain me to the many?
I... perhaps God? No one at all? "

― Mikhail Lermontov

20 " ولكنني لم أفهم مصيري الذي خُلقت له، بل كان يجرني سراب أهواء عميقة. "

― Mikhail Lermontov , A Hero of Our Time