Boris Pasternak Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  78 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Life, Failure

  Doctor Zhivago ch. 13 (1958) (translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari)

  80 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Loss, Gains, Seeds

  Roger Martin du Gard, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Gabriela Mistral (1971). “Roger Martin du Gard: Gabriela Mistral ; Boris Pasternak”

  40 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Art, People, Ordinary

  70 Copy quote

• And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

  Boris Pasternak

  Remember You, Remembers You, Despair

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Anxious, Myth

  23 Copy quote

• An unshared happiness is not happiness.

  Boris Pasternak

  Roger Martin du Gard, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Gabriela Mistral (1971). “Roger Martin du Gard: Gabriela Mistral ; Boris Pasternak”

  7 Copy quote

• They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

  Boris Pasternak

  Hate, Want, Despise

  47 Copy quote

• It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Fall, Writing, Light

  Christopher Barnes, Christopher J. Barnes, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (2004). “Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography”, p.363, Cambridge University Press

  13 Copy quote

• Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

  Boris Pasternak

  Life, Journey, Men

  Doctor Zhivago ch. 9 (1958) (translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari)

  57 Copy quote

• I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.

  Boris Pasternak

  Thinking, People, Revolutionary

  5 Copy quote

• To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

  Boris Pasternak

  Adventure, Men, Mad

  49 Copy quote

• 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

  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Jon Stallworthy, Peter France (1983). “Selected poems”, Lane, Allen

  33 Copy quote

• 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

  51 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Hurt, Doe, Alive

  "Doctor Zhivago". Book by Boris Pasternak, 1957.

  18 Copy quote

• She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

  Boris Pasternak

  Enchantment, Earth, Make Sense

  3 Copy quote

• In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.

  Boris Pasternak

  Change, War, Learning

  4 Copy quote

• Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

  Boris Pasternak

  Life, Leadership, Morning

  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1959). “Poetry, 1917-1959”

  46 Copy quote

• 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

  "Doctor Zhivago". Book by Boris Pasternak. Paraphrase of the 1958 translation, as quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978), 1957.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  "Bridges to Infinity : The Human Side of Mathematics". Book by Michael Guillen, 1983.

  20 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Artist, Discovery, Overwhelmed

  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1976). “My sister, life and other poems”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  14 Copy quote

• 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, Opposites, Duplicity

  40 Copy quote

• 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, Doctor Zhivago

  37 Copy quote

• I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.

  Boris Pasternak

  Love You

  6 Copy quote

• Failure to love is almost like murder.

  Boris Pasternak

  Love Is, Murder

  "Doctor Zhivago". Book by Boris Pasternak, 1957.

  9 Copy quote

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