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 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the relationship between faith, history, and the role of Christ in shaping modern life.
Boris Pasternak's quote conveys the idea that one can hold a secular view or uncertainty about the divine while still acknowledging the profound impact of history shaped by religious narratives, particularly those surrounding Christ. It suggests that even without belief in God, the influence of Christian teachings and the development of history through the Gospels have fundamentally shaped human existence and moral frameworks.
Themes
FaithHistoryChristPhilosophyBelief
In practice
Example use cases
During a philosophical debate on the origins of morality.
More from Boris Pasternak
All quotes →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.
Boris PasternakRead
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.
Boris PasternakRead
Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
Boris PasternakRead
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
Boris PasternakRead
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!
Boris PasternakRead
Similar quotes
When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.
Edith HamiltonRead
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Iris MurdochRead
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official "Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.
C. S. LewisRead
I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.
Abraham LincolnRead