Boris Pasternak

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

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.

He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men -- it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.

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

The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

Even so, one step from my grave,_x000D_ _x000D_ I believe that cruelty, spite,_x000D_ _x000D_ The powers of darkness will in time_x000D_ _x000D_ Be crushed by the spirit of light.

Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and humans could breathe freely. It was not until after him that people began to live toward the future. Humans do not die in a ditch like a dog-but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; they die sharing in this work.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

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

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

No bad man can be a good poet.