Quotes of Boris Pasternak - somelinesforyou

“ Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ 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

“ 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

“ 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

“ Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of selfrenewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ 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

“ 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. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ Poetry is a rich, fullbodied 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

“ 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. ”

- Boris Pasternak

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

- Boris Pasternak

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

- Boris Pasternak

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

- Boris Pasternak

“ Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed. ”

- 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

“ That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ 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. ”

- 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

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

- Boris Pasternak

“ 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 sacrified himself. ”

- Boris Pasternak

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

- 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

“ 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 sacrified himself. ”

- 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

“ A corner draft fluttered the flame, and the white fever of temptation, upswept its angel wings that cast, a cruciform shadow. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ 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. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ 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. ”

- Boris Pasternak

“ 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. ”

- 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

“ A corner draft fluttered the flame, and the white fever of temptation, upswept its angel wings that cast, a cruciform shadow. ”

- Boris Pasternak
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