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

  82 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”

  12 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

  8 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

  74 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)

  85 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

  25 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”

  42 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

  49 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)

  60 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

  15 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

  35 Copy quote

• I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.

  Boris Pasternak

  Love You

  8 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Adventure, Men, Mad

  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.

  20 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

  8 Copy quote

• We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.

  Boris Pasternak

  Eternity, All Time, Hostage

  7 Copy quote

• Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

  Boris Pasternak

  Lying, Faithfulness, Salvation

  11 Copy quote

• In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Truth, Generations, Fool

  11 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Life, Leadership, Morning

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

  48 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Enchantment, Earth, Make Sense

  5 Copy quote

• Failure to love is almost like murder.

  Boris Pasternak

  Love Is, Murder

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

  11 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.

  22 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

  53 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Break, Doctor Zhivago, Solitary

  9 Copy quote

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