Boris Pasternak - Life Quotes

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

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

Boris Pasternak
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

Boris Pasternak
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our souls exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in the mouth. It can't forever be violated with impunity.

Boris Pasternak
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
In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

Boris Pasternak
If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself...

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

Boris Pasternak