No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.
Boris PasternakReshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about lifeโthey have never felt its breath, its heartbeatโhowever much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
Boris PasternakThey don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Boris PasternakBut what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?
Boris PasternakYou and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.
Boris Pasternak