Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternakwas a Soviet and Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderon and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 February 1890
CountryRussian Federation
loyalty thinking stronger
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.
sleep men thinking
I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
real thinking play
It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?--Ah, there you are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago.
thinking people revolutionary
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.
boldness disease draws fall gift good life root
You fall into my arms. / You are the good gift of destruction's path, / When life sickens more than disease / And boldness is the root of beauty- / Which draws us together.
inspirational circles shining
Here they are, all in one place. Circle back to them when you need some poetic shine. It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days, but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze.
fear hot pairs
But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?
mean men would-be
It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.
angel flames wings
A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
life years lasts
During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
life simple hypocrisy
I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
remember-you remembers-you despair
And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
real war lying
And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.
war learning two
In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.