Boris Pasternak Quotes

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• 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)

  74 Copy quote

• 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

  68 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

  64 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)

  50 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

  41 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Adventure, Men, Mad

  43 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

  45 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”

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  39 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

  27 Copy quote

• 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, Matter

  4 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

  35 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Life, Leadership, Morning

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

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  27 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

  15 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Mother, People, Faults

  33 Copy quote

• 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

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Simple, Speak, Assembly

  3 Copy quote

• Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Love, Anniversary, Strong

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  LIFE magazine, June 13, 1960.

  48 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

  9 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

  34 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

  9 Copy quote

• Failure to love is almost like murder.

  Boris Pasternak

  Love Is, Murder

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Eye

  29 Copy quote

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