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No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

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
May
Across
Come
Compassion
Love
Objects
World
Deep
Feeling
Strong
Unmixed
Feelings
Victim
Seems
Object

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

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Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
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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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
Boris Pasternak
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I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.
Boris Pasternak
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An unshared happiness is not happiness.
Boris Pasternak
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The whole wide world is a cathedral I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
Boris Pasternak
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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 Pasternak
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The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
Boris Pasternak
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A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
Boris Pasternak
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I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.
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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But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.
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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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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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Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.
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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Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
Boris Pasternak