Boris Pasternak Quotations

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.

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

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.

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

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

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.

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.

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

No bad man can be a good poet.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out.

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.

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.

Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.

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

I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish." - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago

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!

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.

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 =

You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.

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.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.

Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.

I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.

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.

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

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

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.

... the unarmed power of naked truth.

Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. 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 neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

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.

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

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

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.

Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop.

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

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.

If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?--Ah, there you are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago.

Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.

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.

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

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

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.

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.

Failure to love is almost like murder.

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

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

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

An unshared happiness is not happiness.

We must discover security within ourselves.

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

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.

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.

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

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

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

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.

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

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.

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.

Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.

Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?

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.

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

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

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

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.

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.

It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and humans could breathe freely. It was not until after him that people began to live toward the future. Humans do not die in a ditch like a dog-but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; they die sharing in this work.

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.

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

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.