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 PASTERNAKDeparture beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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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.
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He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
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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.
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Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
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No bad man can be a good poet.
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The unarmed power of naked truth.
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A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
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To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.
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I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.
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During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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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.
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And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
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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.
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The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
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Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
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And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
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Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
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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.
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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.
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At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
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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.
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They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
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All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
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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.
BORIS PASTERNAK