Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814-10-15 – 1841-07-27) was a Russian Romantic writer and poet, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus."

Sourced

• O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!
  • A Hero of Our Time (1839)

• Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea.
  • A Hero of Our Time

• 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.
  • A Hero of Our Time

• I would make any sacrifice but this; twenty times I can stake my life, even my honour, but my freedom I shall never sell. Why do I prize it so much? ... What am I aiming at? Nothing, absolutely nothing.
  • A Hero of Our Time
  • Referring to marriage

• 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

• 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)

Unsourced

• I little lived and was not free
  Two captive lives can never be
  To tortured free one half as good
  I would exchange them if I could.

• Exchange I would for one short day,
  For less, for but one hour amid
  The jagged rocks where play I did,
  A child, if 'twere but offered me,
  Both Heaven and eternity!