Quotes from 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.

No bad man can be a good poet.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breath-takingly serious!

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.

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.

During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

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

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

Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?

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

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.

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

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.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

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

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

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

How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.

Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

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.

Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.

I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.