Top 100 Boris Pasternak Quotes
#2. There is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as death. Death has nothing to do with us. But you said something about being talented
that it makes one different. Now, that does have something to do with us. And talent in the highest and broadest sense means talent for life.
Boris Pasternak
#3. Aren't we sensitive! We're something special. We're cultured. It's too much for us.
Boris Pasternak
#4. In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
Boris Pasternak
#6. Don't let my soul be riddled / by deceit: kill it or, / like fog, it will seep through / a heap of white chaff.
Boris Pasternak
#7. In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will.
Boris Pasternak
#8. If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with a magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow.
Boris Pasternak
#9. The sky, drunk with spring and giddy with its fumes, thickened with clouds. Low clouds, drooping at the edges like felt sailed over the woods and rain leapt from them, warm, smelling of soil and sweat, and washing the last of the black armor-plating of ice from the earth.
Boris Pasternak
#10. 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
#11. The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
Boris Pasternak
#12. I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.
Boris Pasternak
#13. Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
Boris Pasternak
#14. No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.
Boris Pasternak
#15. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself ...
Boris Pasternak
#16. Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple not as in an intestinal obstruction
Boris Pasternak
#17. Who does more for a nation
the one who makes a fuss about it or the one who, without thinking of it, raises it to universality by the beauty of his actions, and gives it fame and immortality?
Boris Pasternak
#18. This was a time to prepare for the cold weather, to store up fire and wood. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become a disembodied idea, and the problems of alimentation and fuel supply took the place of food and firewood.
Boris Pasternak
#19. 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
#20. The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
Boris Pasternak
#21. He craved an idea, inspired yet concrete, that would show a clear path and change the world for the better, an idea as unmistakable to a child or an ignorant fool as lightning or a roll of thunder. He craved for something new.
Boris Pasternak
#22. I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
Boris Pasternak
#23. Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
Boris Pasternak
#24. How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
Boris Pasternak
#25. What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.
Boris Pasternak
#26. Here they are, all in one place. Circle back to them when you need some poetic shine.
It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days,
but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze.
Boris Pasternak
#27. She was incomparable in her inspired loveliness. Her arms amazed one, as one can be astonished by a lofty way of thinking. Her shadow on the wallpaper of the hotel room seemed the silhouette of her uncorruption.
Boris Pasternak
#28. And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
Boris Pasternak
#29. As for the men in power,
they are so anxious to establish
the myth of infallibility that they
do their utmost to ignore truth.
Boris Pasternak
#30. Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
Boris Pasternak
#31. Poetry searches for music amidst the tumult of the dictionary.
Boris Pasternak
#32. As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence.
Boris Pasternak
#33. Don't you see, we are not in the same position. You were given wings to fly above the clouds, but I'm a woman, mine are given me to stay close to the ground and to shelter my young.
Boris Pasternak
#34. 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
#35. And then the two basic ideals of modern man- without them he is unthinkable- the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrafice
Boris Pasternak
#37. 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
#38. And if he were really to do good he would have needed in addition to his principles, a heart capable of violating them - a heart which knows only of particular not of general cases and which achieves greatness in little actions.
Boris Pasternak
#39. Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great.
Boris Pasternak
#40. 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
#42. I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
Boris Pasternak
#43. 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
#44. Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.
Boris Pasternak
#45. 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
#46. There shall be no more death, Because we have already seen all that, Its old and we are tired of it, And now we need something new, And this new thing is Eternal Life
Boris Pasternak
#47. Now, as never before, it was clear to him that art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life.
Boris Pasternak
#48. 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
#49. Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
Boris Pasternak
#50. Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Boris Pasternak
#51. The greatness of a writer has nothing to do with subject matter itself, only with how much the subject matter touches the author.
Boris Pasternak
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
Boris Pasternak
#57. In one corner the piano tuner scattered arpeggios live handfuls of beads.
Boris Pasternak
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. Her dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.
Boris Pasternak
#62. The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alchohol stove.
Boris Pasternak
#63. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
Boris Pasternak
#64. Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
Boris Pasternak
#65. They came out of the vault intoxicated, not by the mere thought of food, but by the consciousness that they too were of use in the world and did not live in vain, and had deserved the praise and thanks which Tonya would shower on them at home.
Boris Pasternak
#66. At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
Boris Pasternak
#67. 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
#68. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
Boris Pasternak
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. It's alleged that our scourge of God and punishment from heaven, Commissar Strelnikov, is Antipov come back to life. A legend, of course. And it's not like him.
Boris Pasternak
#74. Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.
Boris Pasternak
#75. And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
Boris Pasternak
#76. It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
Boris Pasternak
#78. She had once been the belle of her circle of small tradesmen and salesmen, but now her little pig eyes with their swollen lids could scarcely open.
Boris Pasternak
#79. 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
#80. Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
Boris Pasternak
#81. They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns.
Boris Pasternak
#82. 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
#83. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently
Boris Pasternak
#84. Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.
Boris Pasternak
#85. What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
Boris Pasternak
#86. 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
#87. As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
Boris Pasternak
#88. He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
Boris Pasternak
#90. A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
Boris Pasternak
#91. I was sent by God to torment / myself, my family, everyone / whom it's a sin to torment.
Boris Pasternak
#92. While the music played a whole eternity went by like life in a novel
Boris Pasternak
#93. But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?
Boris Pasternak
#94. Drying, the storm mumbles, / like a freshly washed apron.
Boris Pasternak
#96. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name
Boris Pasternak
#97. Still more than by the communion of souls, they were united by the abyss that separated them from the rest of the world.
Boris Pasternak
#98. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. In the case of some men, compassion for a woman exceeds all measure and transports her to an unreal, entirely imaginary world.
Boris Pasternak
#99. The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they're villains, but because it's a mechanism out of control, like a machine that's gone off the rails.
Boris Pasternak
#100. You said that facts are meaningless, unless meanings are put into them. Well, Christianity, the mystery of the individual, is precisely what must be put into the facts to make them meaningful.
Boris Pasternak
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