We practically always excuse things when we understand them.

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.

He turned away and offered his hand in parting. She didn’t take it or say anything. But from where I was behind the door I could see her face through the crack. I pitied her to see how deathly pale that sweet little face had gone. Hearing no answer, Pechorin took a few steps towards the door. He was trembling, and I might say I think he was fit to do what he’d threatened as a joke. That’s the sort of man he was, there was no knowing him.

Les joies s’oublient, les peines jamais.

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

If I had even been his friend, well and good: the artful indiscretion of the true friend is intelligible to everybody; but I only saw Pechorin once in my life – on the high-road – and, consequently, I cannot cherish towards him that inexplicable hatred, which, hiding its face under the mask of friendship, awaits but the death or misfortune of the beloved object to burst over its head in a storm of reproaches, admonitions, scoffs and regrets.

And then we had one of those conversations which make no sense on paper, which you can’t repeat and can’t even remember. The sounds mean more than the words, like in an Italian opera.

My soul has been spoiled by the world, my imagination is unquiet, my heart insatiate. To me everything is of little moment. I become as easily accustomed to grief as to joy, and my life grows emptier day by day. One expedient only is left to me – travel.

Note, my good doctor,” said I, “that without fools, society would be a very tiresome place!

The story of a man’s soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation, especially if it is based on the self-analysis of a mature mind and is written with no vain desire to rouse our sympathy and curiosity. The problem with Rousseau’s Confessions is that he read them to his friends.