"I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."
"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth."
7 likes
Source: Doctor Zhivago. Book by Boris Pasternak. Paraphrase of the 1958 translation, as quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978), 1957.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Boris Pasternak
"When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it."
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
"What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves."
"Man is born to live, not to prepare for life."
"The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman."