Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will.

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.

Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

No bad man can be a good poet.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

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.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

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.

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 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.

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.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

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

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

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.

At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.

That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

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.

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.

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

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

Here they are, all in one place. Circle back to them when you need some poetic shine. It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days, but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze.

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

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

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.

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.

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.

She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

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.

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

I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.

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.

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.

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.

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

Failure to love is almost like murder.

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

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.

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.

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

An unshared happiness is not happiness.

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

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.

We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.

The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?