Quotes by Boris Pasternak

About Boris Pasternak:

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and William Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

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

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

Boris Pasternak

In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will.

Boris Pasternak

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

Boris Pasternak

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

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

The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it ...Art is inconceivable without risk...

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

I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one’s slant accordingly—at least once every ten years. The great heroic devotion to one point o...

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

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you...

Boris Pasternak

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

Boris Pasternak

No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.

Boris Pasternak

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.

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 gr...

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 yo...

Boris Pasternak

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.

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

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

Boris Pasternak

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

Boris Pasternak

Author Bio

  • NameBoris Pasternak
  • DescriptionRussian writer
  • AliasesBoris Leonidovich Pasternak
  • BornFebruary 10, 1890
  • DiedMay 30, 1960
  • CountryRussian Empire; Soviet Union
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Translator; Novelist
  • WorksDoctor Zhivago
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature