Boris Pasternak quotes

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live. (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
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
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
How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
Boris Pasternak
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.
Boris Pasternak
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
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
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.
Boris Pasternak
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.
Boris Pasternak
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)
She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
Boris Pasternak
And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
Boris Pasternak
I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.
Boris Pasternak
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
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.
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
I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.
Boris Pasternak
What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
Boris Pasternak
Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
Boris Pasternak
I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it. (Boris Pasternak)
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.
Boris Pasternak
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.
Boris Pasternak
Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
Boris Pasternak
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Boris Pasternak