Skip to content

Am I a gangster or a murderer?
Of what crime do I stand
Condemned? I made the whole world weep
At the beauty of my land.

— Boris Pasternak Selected Poems (1983)

Another quote →

Topics

Beauty

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

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.

All Boris Pasternak quotes →

You may also like

Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Boris Pasternak (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.