Boris Pasternak Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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 People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.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