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Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

Boris Pasternak

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Boris Pasternak
Age: 70 †
Born: 1890
Born: February 10
Died: 1960
Died: May 30
Novelist
Pianist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Moscow
Russian SFSR
Holiwis
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Without
Keys
Thing
Exist
Always
Joy
Life
Since
Beauty
Living
Possessing
Art
Organic
Form
Serves

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

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Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Boris Pasternak
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Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
Boris Pasternak
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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
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A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.
Boris Pasternak
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Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
Boris Pasternak
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During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
Boris Pasternak
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I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.
Boris Pasternak
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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
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Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.
Boris Pasternak
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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 Pasternak
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How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.
Boris Pasternak
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As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.
Boris Pasternak
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No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.
Boris Pasternak
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Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
Boris Pasternak
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That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Boris Pasternak
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You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
Boris Pasternak
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A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
Boris Pasternak
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It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
Boris Pasternak
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I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish. - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
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And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.
Boris Pasternak