They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Boris PasternakRead
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
Interpretation
Life's complexities often cannot be captured by simple facts or rules.
This quote by Boris Pasternak suggests that the true essence of life transcends the limitations of structured knowledge and factual information. It implies that while we may have a framework of understanding, the richness and depth of life involve experiences and emotions that go beyond what can be quantitatively measured or ordered.
In practice
In a discussion about the limitations of scientific understanding in explaining human emotions.
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!
You'll live forever in our hearts, big man. That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU!
The contemporary Christian mind is starved, and as a result we have small, impoverished souls.
Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.
Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
It was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. 'Because you are not cute, I do not want to know you' was, to me, hardly different from suggesting 'because you are gay, I dislike you
We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.
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