Boris Pasternak Quotes

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.

Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently.

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

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

Zij was nog een meisje, een kind, maar in haar ogen en op haar gezicht kon je de waakzaamheid en de onrust van deze eeuw al aflezen. Alle thema's, alle tranen en beledigingen, alle beweegredenen, alle opgehoopte haat en trots van deze eeuw stonden op haar gezicht en postuur geschreven, in het mengsel ook van haar meisjesachtige bedeesdheid en haar vermetele gratie. Je kon uit haar naam en uit haar lippen de aanklacht tegen deze eeuw indienen en uitroepen. U zult moeten toegeven, dat dat geen kleinigheid was. Het had iets van een voorbeschikking, van een voorteken ook. Het was iets, waar zij van nature over beschikt moet hebben, iets waar zij recht op gehad moet hebben.

She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new.

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

How can you be yourself when you are being blown in a million different directions you can’t control?

Poetry searches for music amidst the tumult of the dictionary.

The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.

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.

Не спи, не спи, художник,
Не предавайся сну.
Ты – вечности заложник
У времени в плену.

Remember, there are neither honest people nor friends anymore. Still less anyone knowledgeable

She was incomparable in her inspired loveliness. Her arms amazed one, as one can be astonished by a lofty way of thinking. Her shadow on the wallpaper of the hotel room seemed the silhouette of her uncorruption.

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...