Quotes from Doctor Zhivago

“I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn´t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“To be a woman is a great adventure;
To drive men mad is a heroic thing.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. It's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“And now listen carefully. You in others-this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life-your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you-the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however 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 Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Everything had changed suddenly--the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute--life or truth or beauty--of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries. ”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“الأغنية محاولة مجنونة لإيقاف الزمن بالكلمات”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to be a victim.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“كل النساء هن أمهات رجال عظام ، ولا لوم عليهن إذا ما خيبت الحياة أملهن فيما بعد”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

“If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.”
― Boris Pasternak, quote from Doctor Zhivago

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.