Boris Pasternak Quotes

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

An unshared happiness is not happiness.

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.

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

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

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

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

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

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

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.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.

We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.

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.

She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

Failure to love is almost like murder.

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 self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

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

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

The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.