Boris Pasternak
Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.Collection: Anniversary
Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.Collection: Thankful
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Beauty
Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.Collection: Brainy
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.Collection: Poetry
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.Collection: Art
Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.Collection: Life
They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
No bad man can be a good poet.
What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
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.
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.
As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
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.
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.
Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
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.
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.
At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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.Collection: Inspirational
And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.Collection: Remember You
In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.Collection: Loss
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.Collection: Life
It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.Collection: Fall
I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.Collection: Love You
To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.Collection: Adventure
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.Collection: Truth
She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.Collection: Enchantment
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.Collection: Thinking
Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficientlyCollection: Break
Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.Collection: Self
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.Collection: Love
How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?Collection: Hurt
Failure to love is almost like murder.Collection: Love Is
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.Collection: Lying
The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.Collection: Life Is
But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?Collection: Fear
Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.Collection: Party
But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =Collection: Years
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.Collection: Death
As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.Collection: Wall
I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.Collection: Writing
I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.Collection: Hate
No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.Collection: Men
We must discover security within ourselves.Collection: Anticipation
Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.Collection: Song