89 Quotes by Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak, born on February 10, 1890, in Moscow, Russia, was a renowned Russian writer and poet. His most celebrated work, "Doctor Zhivago," published in 1957, is considered a literary masterpiece. Pasternak's writing skillfully captures the complexities of human emotions and delves into the depths of the human condition.
Through his vivid descriptions and profound insights, he weaves a tapestry of love, revolution, and the struggle for individual freedom. "Doctor Zhivago" faced initial censorship in the Soviet Union due to its critique of the regime, but it eventually gained international acclaim and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. Pasternak's writing transcends political boundaries and offers a deeply personal and introspective exploration of life's most profound questions. His works continue to resonate with readers worldwide, inspiring contemplation and fostering a deeper understanding of the human experience.
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.
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. (Meaning)
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.
They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
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.
In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
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.
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.
How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
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.
A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.
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!
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.
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
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.
A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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.
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.
Failure to love is almost like murder.
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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.
Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
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.
What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
An unshared happiness is not happiness.
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 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.
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
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.
Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
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.
And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.
Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently
It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.
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.
I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.
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.
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.
Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.
No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.
Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
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.
If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.
We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
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.
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.
A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.
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.
Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.
No bad man can be a good poet.
We must discover security within ourselves.
I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?
She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.
The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.
He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men -- it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.
Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop.
― Boris Pasternak Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
