Boris Pasternak Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

  Boris Pasternak

  Men, Beast, Century

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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

  Boris Pasternak

  Death, Country, Borders

  5 Copy quote

• Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

  Boris Pasternak

  Sleep, Long, Understanding

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

  17 Copy quote

• ... the unarmed power of naked truth.

  Boris Pasternak

  Truth, Naked, Unarmed

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Circles, Shining

  4 Copy quote

• Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

  Boris Pasternak

  Confused, Love You, Jealous

  21 Copy quote

• Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?

  Boris Pasternak

  Bye, Good Bye, Last Words

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Lyric Poetry, Complicated, Immensity

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

  7 Copy quote

• If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

  Boris Pasternak

  Inspire, Painful, Electricity

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Freedom, Light, People

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Boris Pasternak, “Winter Night”

  12 Copy quote

• I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish." - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago

  Boris Pasternak

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

  8 Copy quote

• It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and humans could breathe freely. It was not until after him that people began to live toward the future. Humans do not die in a ditch like a dog-but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; they die sharing in this work.

  Boris Pasternak

  Death, Dog, Home

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Two, Revelations

  7 Copy quote

• Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.

  Boris Pasternak

  Lying, Order, Best Effort

  The New York Times, January 1, 1978.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  58 Copy quote

• 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, Genuine Life

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.

  Boris Pasternak

  Auras, Isolation, Moments

  Doctor Zhivago Ch. 9, Sect. 3

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• 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, Creating Life

  15 Copy quote

• Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Art, Rays, Moments

  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (2008). “The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak's Writings on Inspiration and Creation”, p.162, Academic Studies PRess

  8 Copy quote

• But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

  Boris Pasternak

  Sorrow, Division, Used

  6 Copy quote

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