Boris Pasternak famous quotes

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Life #Adversity #People

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Art #People #Ordinary

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Inspirational Life #Men #Born

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
-- Boris Pasternak

#Heart #Fate

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Self #People #Principles

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Passion #Clouds #Sky

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
-- Boris Pasternak

#Hurt #Doe #Alive

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Inspirational #Life #Truth

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Life #Leadership #Morning

You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Romantic #Couple #Kissing

Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time Be crushed by the spirit of light.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Time #Believe #Light

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Inspirational #Heart #Opportunity

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Running #Sweet #Night

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Life #Duplicity #Space

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Writing #Might #Copying

The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Artist #Discovery #Overwhelmed

Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently
-- Boris Pasternak

#Break #Solitary

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Fall #Writing #Light

You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction's path, When life sickens more than disease And boldness is the root of beauty - Which draws us together.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Life #Fall #Roots

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Death #Art #Two

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Snow #World #Tables

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Art #Keys #Joy

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Way #Natural #Banality

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Memories #Greatness #Two

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Lasts #Moments

Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Order #Hypocrisy #Pharisees

The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Echoes #Air #Ears

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Sleep #Men #Thinking

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Writing #Symphony #People

You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Eternity #Hostage

Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Love #People #Remarkable

He comes as a guest to the feast of existence, and knows that what matters is not how much he inherits but how he behaves at the feast, and what people remember and love him for.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Life #What Matters #People

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Spiritual #Art #Sacrifice

Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?
-- Boris Pasternak

#Bye #Good Bye #Last Words

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Strong #Compassion #Feelings

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Mother #People #Faults

I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Writing #Broken #Routine

Failure to love is almost like murder.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Love Is #Murder

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Loss #Gains

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Lying #Faithfulness #Salvation

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Complicated #Immensity #Prose

We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Eternity #All Time #Hostage

Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Country #Borders #Departure

A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Angel #Flames #Wings

... the unarmed power of naked truth.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Truth #Naked

I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Light #People #Way

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth
-- Boris Pasternak

#Men #Beast #Century

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Writing #Age #Faust

The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Life Is #Symbolic

No bad man can be a good poet.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Men #Poet

Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Party #Farewell #Secret

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Grateful #Proud

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =
-- Boris Pasternak

#Years #World #Idle

He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men -- it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Mother #Children #Men

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Mediocrity #Individual #Sole

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Genuine #Ripple

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Art #Moving #Reading

As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Wall #Shadow #Scarves

And now listen carefully. You in others-this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life-your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you-the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Memories #Soul #Doe

It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Mean #Men #Different

About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn´t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Life #Dream #Strong

A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Fall #Insomnia #Light

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Flower #Book #Love Life

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Kings #War #Men

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out.
-- Boris Pasternak

#Spring #Fall #Sadness