Boris Pasternak Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Loyalty, Thinking, Stronger

  8 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Love, Anniversary, Strong

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• Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

  Boris Pasternak

  Grateful, Proud, Touched

  Christopher Barnes, Christopher J. Barnes, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (2004). “Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography”, p.342, Cambridge University Press

  10 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Life Is, Symbolic, Whole

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• Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Love, People, Remarkable

  17 Copy quote

• Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

  Boris Pasternak

  Spiritual, Art, Sacrifice

  25 Copy quote

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Kings, War, Men

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Mother, People, Faults

  37 Copy quote

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Romantic, Couple, Kissing

  32 Copy quote

• 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

  Self, Principles, Want

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Boredom, Impression, Doctor Zhivago

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Artist, Discovery, Overwhelmed

  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1976). “My sister, life and other poems”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Life, Opposites, Duplicity

  41 Copy quote

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Heart, Fate, Doctor Zhivago

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  Sleep, Men, Thinking

  "Doctor Zhivago". Book by Boris Pasternak. Paraphrase of the 1958 translation, as quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978), 1957.

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Fall, Insomnia, Light

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Passion, Clouds, Sky

  32 Copy quote

• 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!

  Boris Pasternak

  Sleep, Long, Understanding

  Roger Martin du Gard, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Gabriela Mistral (1971). “Roger Martin du Gard: Gabriela Mistral ; Boris Pasternak”

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• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Life, Dream, Strong

  45 Copy quote

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Memories, Soul, Matter

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• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Simple, Speak, Assembly

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• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Mean, Men, Different

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• 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

  Writing, Age, Faust

  53 Copy quote

• 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.

  Boris Pasternak

  Flower, Book, Eye

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

  Boris Pasternak

  Men, Beast, Century

  "Doctor Zhivago". Book by Boris Pasternak, 1957.

  9 Copy quote

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