32 quotes
Women love only the men they don’t know.
Alone, as before, in the universe
Without hope and without love!..
The Demon (1830)
What would a woman not do to hurt a rival!
I want to reconcile myself with heaven,
I want to love, I want to pray,
I want to believe in good.
The Demon (1830)
In people's eyes I read
Pages of malice and sin.
The Prophet (1841)
What good are the passions? For sooner or later their sweet sickness ends when reason speaks up;
And life, if surveyed with cold-blooded regard is stupid and empty — a joke.
Lonely and Sad (1840)
One should never spurn a penitent criminal: in his despair he may become twice as much a criminal as before.
A Hero of Our Time (1840)
Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although frequently neither acknowledges the fact to himself.
A Hero of Our Time (1840)
And I, as I lived, in an alien land
Will die a slave and an orphan.
The Novice (1839)
And everything that he saw before him
He despised or hated.
The Demon (1830)
Farewell, unwashed Russia,
Land of slaves, land of masters,
And you, blue uniforms,
And you, people, devoted to them.
Perhaps beyond the wall of the Caucasus,
I will hide from your pashas,
From their all-seeing eye,
From their all-hearing ears.
Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning.
A Hero of Our Time (1840)
O women, women! Who really does understand them? Their smiles contradict their glances, their words promise and beguile, but their tone of voice repulses.
I was born, so that the whole world could be a spectator
Of my triumph or my doom...
Fate brought us together by chance (1832)
A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman's heart in particular.
A Hero of Our Time (1840)
...man, this ruler over general evil,
With a perfidious heart, with a lying tongue...
The Cemetery (1830)
No, it is not you I love so ardently,
The glitter of your beauty is not for me:
I love in you my past suffering
And my perished youth.
Women love only those whom they do not know!
A Hero of Our Time (1840)
Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing.
A Hero of Our Time (1840)
O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!
A Hero of Our Time (1840)