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
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.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that experiencing failure and struggle is essential for appreciating the beauty of life.
In this quote, Boris Pasternak expresses the idea that individuals who have never faced challenges or failures lack a deeper understanding of life's richness and complexities. He argues that true virtue is born from the struggles we face, which teach us resilience and allow us to see the beauty that comes from overcoming adversity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about resilience.
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!
but then she did. she died. no more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river.
Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm. It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him... were running out.
The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not "get over" the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.
I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.
You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!
You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.
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