25 quotes
They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Solovyov or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
Bridges to Infinity : The Human Side of Mathematics (1983)
Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist,
Don't give in to sleep.
You are eternity's hostage
A captive of time.
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Doctor Zhivago (1958)
They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
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.
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.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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...
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
"How wonderful to be alive," he thought. "But why does it always hurt?"
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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.
Selected Poems (1983)
It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.
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.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
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.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)