Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
BORIS PASTERNAKImmensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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The unarmed power of naked truth.
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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.
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An unshared happiness is not happiness.
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You are eternity’s hostage A captive of mine.
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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.
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As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
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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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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?
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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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In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
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She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
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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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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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I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
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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.
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Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently.
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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.
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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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The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
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We’re all time’s captives, hostages to eternity.
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Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.
BORIS PASTERNAK