Boris Pasternak Quotes
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.
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.
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
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.
They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
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.
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.
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
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.
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
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.
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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.
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.
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.
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.
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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.
What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.
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.
Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
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.
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.
As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
He comes as a guest to the feast of existence, and knows that what matters is not how much he inherits but how he behaves at the feast, and what people remember and love him for.