Boris Pasternak

My own heart would have concealed it from me, for failure to love is almost like murder and I would have been incapable of inflicting such a blow on anyone.

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...

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Solovyov or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth.

If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love.

Snow, snow over the whole land

across all boundaries.

The candle burned on the table,

the candle burned.

A candle burned on the table, a candle burned ... he whispered to himself — the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our souls exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in the mouth. It can't forever be violated with impunity.

I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.

"How wonderful to be alive," he thought. "But why does it always hurt?"

That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats — any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death — then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don’t you see, this is just the point — what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.