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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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Art

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 →

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

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)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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.