Borís Pasternak quotes (40 quotes, page 2)

Quotes Borís 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.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Life, Beauty, Art, Joy

„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.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Love, Goodbye

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

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Love, Truth

„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.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

„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…“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

И вот оказалось, что только жизнь, похожая на жизнь окружающих и среди нее бесследно тонущая, есть жизнь настоящая, что счастье обособленное не есть счастье...
As quoted in The Reporter, Volume 19, 1958
Doctor Zhivago (1957)

Life, Happiness

„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 be a victim.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Love, World, Feeling, Strong

„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.“

— Borís Pasternak

LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Tear, Night

„If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago (1957)

Love, Pain

„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.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Life, Women, Men, God

„My own heart would have concealed it from me, for failure to love is almost like murder and I would have been incapable of inflicting such a blow on anyone.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Мое собственное сердце скрыло бы это от меня, потому что нелюбовь почти как убийство, и я никому не в силах была бы нанести этого удара.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)

Love, Failure, Heart

„Am I a gangster or a murderer?
Of what crime do I stand
Condemned? I made the whole world weep
At the beauty of my land.“

— Borís Pasternak

Selected Poems (1983), Nobel Prize

World, Beauty

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

— Borís Pasternak

As quoted in Bridges to Infinity : The Human Side of Mathematics (1983) by Michael Guillen

Life, Truth

„Like a beast in a pen, I’m cut off
From my friends, freedom, the Sun.
But the hunters are gaining ground;
I’ve nowhere else to run.“

— Borís Pasternak

Selected Poems (1983), Nobel Prize

Freedom, Sun

„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.“

— Borís Pasternak

As quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978)

Life, Effort, Time

„A candle burned on the table, a candle burned … he whispered to himself — the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago (1957), Ch. 3 section 10

Hope

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

— Borís Pasternak

On Soviet bureaucrats, in LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Love, Hate

„Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

As translated by Richard McKane (1985)
Doctor Zhivago (1957)

„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.“

— Borís Pasternak

Selected Poems (1983), Nobel Prize

Light, Time

„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.“

— Borís Pasternak

Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963) edited by George Plimpton.

Life

„The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.“

— Borís Pasternak, book Doctor Zhivago

As quoted in "Boris Pasternak" in I.F. Stone's Weekly (3 November 1958), § "Words Which Apply to Us As Well As Russia"; later in The Best of I.F. Stone (2006), p. 43
Doctor Zhivago (1957)

People, Confidence, Imagination, Sense