No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow. - Boris Pasternak
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary. - Boris Pasternak
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. - Boris Pasternak
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. - Boris Pasternak
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. - Boris Pasternak
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it. - Boris Pasternak
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. - Boris Pasternak
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth. - Boris Pasternak
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. - Boris Pasternak
Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades. - Boris Pasternak
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup. - Boris Pasternak
Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth. - Boris Pasternak
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! - Boris Pasternak
And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart? - Boris Pasternak