Boris Pasternak Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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.

Boris Pasternak
It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

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

Boris Pasternak
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.

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

Boris Pasternak
I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

Boris Pasternak
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.

Boris Pasternak
Am I a gangster or a murderer?
Of what crime do I stand
Condemned? I made the whole world weep
At the beauty of my land.

Boris Pasternak
Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.

Boris Pasternak
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
But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =

Boris Pasternak
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.

Boris Pasternak
"How wonderful to be alive," he thought. "But why does it always hurt?"

Boris Pasternak
Work seethes in the hands of spring,
That strapping dairymaid.

Boris Pasternak
And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.

Boris Pasternak
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
My soul, you are a mourner
Of all where I survive.
You are a mausoleum
Of those tortured alive.

Boris Pasternak
Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

Boris Pasternak
The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbour, as cold and lonely as itself.

Boris Pasternak
As after a storm
The surf floods over the reeds,
So in his heart
Her image is submerged.
In the years of trial,
When life was inconceivable,
From the bottom of the sea the tide of destiny
Washed her up to him.

Boris Pasternak
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breathtakingly serious!

Boris Pasternak
We live in days to come, I tell them firmly,
And share one lot in common now. If crippled,
No matter! Stay. We are in fact run over
By the New Man in the wagon of his Plan.

Boris Pasternak
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.

Boris Pasternak
The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.

Boris Pasternak
During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist... literature had stopped.

Boris Pasternak
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
I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.

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

Boris Pasternak
A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.

Boris Pasternak