Quotes from Boris Pasternak

Now, as never before, it was clear to him that art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life.

More vividly than ever before he realized that 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.

Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration.

Unshared happiness is not happiness.

E non devi recedere d'un solo briciolo dalla tua persona umana, ma essere vivo, nient'altro che vivo, vivo e nient'altro sino alla fine.

Ecco che cos'era la vita, che cos'era l'esperienza, che cosa inseguivano coloro che andavano in cerca di avventure, ecco a che cosa mirava l'arte: ritornare a casa propria, ai propri affetti, riprendere la vita

They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns.

Where the pond's an open secret, where apple-trees whisper of waves, where the garden hanging on piles, holds the sky before its face.

Io non amo la gente perfetta, quelli che non sono mai caduti, non hanno inciampato. La loro è una virtù spenta, di poco valore. A loro non si è svelata la bellezza della vita.

Não gosto dos justos, dos que nunca caíram, que não recuaram. A virtude deles é morta, sem valor. A beleza da vida não foi revelada para eles.

Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death.

They had become too conceited to be capable of normal human feelings.

Più di una volta ho notato che proprio le cose cui si è appena badato durante il giorno, le idee non chiarite, le parole dette senza pensarci e alle quali non si è prestata attenzione tornano di notte in immagini concrete e vive, e diventano oggetto di sogni, quasi a rivalsa di essere state tarscurate.

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.

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 of view is very alien to me—it's a lack of humility. Mayakovsky killed himself because his pride would not be reconciled with something new happening within himself—or around him.

Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.

Then untruth came to the Russian land. The main trouble, the root of the future evil, was loss of faith in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the urgings of their moral sense was gone, that now they had to sing to the general tune and live by foreign notions imposed on everyone. The dominion of the ready-made phrase began to grow—first monarchistic, then revolutionary.

All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy.

I was sent by God to torment / myself, my family, everyone / whom it's a sin to torment.

And while one early morning, I, Behind the desk, delayed each sentence, The winter came and passed me by With some unrecognized resemblance.

What must one be, to rave year after year with delirious feverishness about nonexistent, long-extinct themes, and to know nothing, to see nothing around one!

But all the time one and the same boundlessly identical life fills the universe and is renewed every hour in countless combinations and transformations. Here you have fears about whether you will resurrect, yet you already resurrected when you were born, and you didn't notice it.

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

Um homem a ferros tende sempre a idealizar a sua escravatura.