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

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

— Mikhail Lermontov

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

I have 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

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. Furthermore, 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

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, unrewarding passions. I was tempered in their flames and came out cold and hard as steel, but I'd lost forever that fire of noble endeavor, that finest flower of life. How many times 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. Furthermore, 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

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. Furthermore, I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. Furthermore, I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. Furthermore, I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.

— Mikhail Lermontov

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 hereof 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