Boris Quotes & Sayings

The principle of [divine] purpose ... stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks ... The probability for such an event as the origin of DNA molecules to have occurred by sheer chance is just too small to be seriously considered. — Ernst Boris Chain

I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely. — Boris Pasternak

The West has not lived through totalitarianism, with a single ideology for 70 years.We are escaping from the burden of the past, and onlyafter we have done that will we be ready to integrate with Europeand Europe needs Russia. — Boris Yeltsin

Huge numbers of people in London depend on their cars. Fuel duty is becoming a big factor in people's cost of living. I believe in trying to ease these burdens. — Boris Johnson

Working at the pharmacy, you get the impression that there are no healthy people in the world. The normal condition is not health but illness. — Boris Fishman

Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia. — Boris Yeltsin

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself ... — Boris Pasternak

On the other hand, chess is a mass sport now and for chess organisers shorter time control is obviously more attractive. But I think that this control does not suit World Championship matches. — Boris Spassky

Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest. — Boris Pasternak

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. — Boris Pasternak

In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will. — Boris Pasternak

I don't care if you are religious or not and I think the message is that at the end of the day, everybody has to mature and everybody has to heal and mend their own injuries, emotional injuries, on their own pace. — Boris Kodjoe

It was interesting to see the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language - a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body. — Donna Tartt

Gospel artists are messengers; they are vessels of a message. — Boris Kodjoe

I believed in raising my children as I had been raised. — Boris Becker

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it. — Boris Pasternak

You see Boris Becker, Mats Wilander, Nadal, Pete Sampras - they were all great when they were young. As a coach, you can see that type of talent at an early age. — Brad Gilbert

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned. — Boris Pasternak

That Mossberg," Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. "Evil dirty thing. Sawed off
? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room. — Donna Tartt

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live. — Boris Pasternak

If you can't test it, don't build it. If you don't test it, rip it out. — Boris Beizer

How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it. — Boris Pasternak

Just back from canal ride on bike. Went really well until someone threw an egg at me from a bridge. Or maybe it was a bird which went into sudden labour. Will clean off egg, not do Boris Bikes any more and go to Obesity Clinic on bus. At least will be alive and clean when sitting on arse instead of dead and covered in egg. — Helen Fielding

We Russians are already living, not getting ready to live. — Boris Yeltsin

I was always interested in medicine and I was actually a pre-med major. — Boris Kodjoe

Boris Johnson is a man of great attributes and great qualities. — Michael Gove

Volunteering is also now more crucial than ever in helping people find work. — Boris Johnson

He was ... wearing a tasselled velvet nightcap that I [Amy] noticed the Doctor eyeing up. If Boris didn't watch out, that'd go missing and we'd never hear the end of 'Nightcaps are cool. — James Goss

While maintaining our nuclear potential at the proper level, we need to devote more attention to developing the entire range of means of information warfare. — Boris Yeltsin

Yet I wanted to have children, and I knew that was my purpose, but I wasn't going to settle. — Boris Kodjoe

I think it'd be disgraceful if a chap wasn't allowed to have a bit of fun in Las Vegas. The real scandal would be if you went all the way to Las Vegas and you didn't misbehave in some trivial way. — Boris Johnson

Her grandfather's books [ ... ] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious — Irene Nemirovsky

Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation, and inversely as the unification of consciousness. — Boris Sidis

There is only one thing Fischer does in Chess without pleasure: to lose! — Boris Spassky

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.
And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all. — Boris Pasternak

You don't understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one's neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man's heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable
namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. — Boris Pasternak

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

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt? — Boris Pasternak

I cannot shift the blame for Chechnya, for the sorrow of numerous mothers and fathers. I made the decision, therefore I am responsible. — Boris Yeltsin

I'm made up of immigrant stock. I went to a primary school in London. I grew up eating Spangles, why shouldn't I be as well placed to speak for Londoners as anyone else? — Boris Johnson

My love for you is past the mind, beyond my heart, and into my soul. — Boris Kodjoe

She breathed heavily, like a figure skater just off the ice. — Boris Fishman

The Remain campaign ... I've never seen a more miserable offering. All they are saying is stay in and we'll do our best to make sure that Britain's Parliamentary independence isn't eroded faster than we can possibly imagine. — Boris Johnson

Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don't like people who are indifferent to the truth. — Boris Pasternak

I want to win and I want to be in office. — Boris Johnson

Can't I?" he said. "Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant's head." He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them. — Boris Fishman

I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects — Boris Johnson

How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes.
These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling ... — Boris Pasternak

Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology. — Boris Sidis

We are living in an artificial world - a world of fantasies and illusions. We've learned beautiful phrases but haven't learned yet how to carry out that little bit that we know. Our brains are stuffed with quotations, while at the same time nine out of ten of these dogmas are incomprehensible, murky, or lies. Which are worthwhile and which are not? Yes, I must stop being false before others and myself. How simple it all seems! But how do I do this? Let just a little time pass, and then we may understand - only the simplest, honorable acts determine the value of a man. Only I myself can and must help myself to become an adult. — Boris Gorbachevsky

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy. — Boris Becker

It was a confusing time in my life, a really bad day at the office. — Boris Becker

The sky, drunk with spring and giddy with its fumes, thickened with clouds. Low clouds, drooping at the edges like felt sailed over the woods and rain leapt from them, warm, smelling of soil and sweat, and washing the last of the black armor-plating of ice from the earth. — Boris Pasternak

The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they've forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven't asked for it. You probably fancy that there's no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that's dear to me and that I live by. — Boris Pasternak

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs. — Boris Pasternak

I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn't go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar. — Boris Johnson

What are you doing? he gasped. He looked slightly ridiculous. It was not as if he was a defenseless damsel in distress. He could have stopped me, if he wanted to. But he didn't want to. Besides, I've always considered this to be the most idiotic question in the world. I'm pulling off your pants to have a good look at your dick and your ass, is the obvious answer. Looking being only the first step, by the way. — Boris Brannigan

To Americans Boris Vian has long been one of the hidden glories of French literature. In I Spit on Your Graves, he wrote an utterly untypical work, a blast from his Id that may well have killed him. Even now, with misogyny disguised as racial justice, its venom remains potent and disturbing, in equal parts appalling and riveting. It is a singular book, not for the squeamish, and not to be passed by. — Jim Krusoe

When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same. — Boris Becker

Here they are, all in one place. Circle back to them when you need some poetic shine.
It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days,
but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze. — Boris Pasternak

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. — Boris Pasternak

Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop. — Boris Pasternak

Would Boris like a naughty Natasha in his bed? — Willow Madison

'Son of Frankenstein' is never talked about in the same tone as James Whale's 1931 'Frankenstein.' But it should be. It was Boris Karloff's last appearance in the Frankenstein series and stars Donnie Dunagan, then a child actor. — Mark Gatiss

The good thing in chess is that very often the best moves are the most beautiful ones. The beauty of logic. — Boris Gelfand

I have Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to thank that a Russian writer can not only write anything he wants, but also publish it. — Vladimir Sorokin

It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?
Ah, there you are!
- Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago. — Boris Pasternak

She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new. — Boris Pasternak

The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody's throat. — Boris Pasternak

I want London to be the most cycle-friendly city on Earth, and I want more people to be happy and safe on bicycles. — Boris Johnson

They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
To them - and this made them unusual - the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves. — Boris Pasternak

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. — Boris Pasternak

We have relationships and know the exact outcome with that person because we don't deal with ourselves and don't deal with our issues and end up being attracted to the same person or the person is attracted to our energy. — Boris Kodjoe

The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements. — Boris Sidis

I think that the World Champion should try to defend the quality of play more than anyone else. — Boris Spassky

Money, big money (which is actually a relative concept) is always, under any circumstances, a seduction, a test of morals, a temptation to sin. — Boris Yeltsin

If the objective of testing were to prove that a program is free of bugs, then not only would testing be practically impossible, but it would also be theoretically impossible. — Boris Beizer

I came to America because of a tennis scholarship. I really wanted to get away because I was really frustrated about my injury so my mother said, "Go to America for four months and just open your eyes and see that there's more things than tennis." That's what happened. — Boris Kodjoe

I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm covering innumerable concepts and derivative phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle that is present in every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen art as form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content ... A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways - by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art ... You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can't be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work. — Boris Pasternak

Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It's time for a rethink, and the Tory party - the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth - is where it's happening. — Boris Johnson

The publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West in 1957 and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Boris Pasternak the following year triggered one of the greatest cultural storms of the Cold War. Because of the enduring appeal of the novel, and the 1965 David Lean film based on it, Doctor Zhivago remains a landmark piece of fiction. Yet few readers know the trials of its birth and how the novel galvanized a world largely divided between the competing ideologies of two superpowers. — Peter Finn

He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference. — Boris Johnson

But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there. — Donna Tartt

I think I'm basically a liberal Conservative - I believe in low tax, spirit of free enterprise, and in making sure that we as politicians create the framework for business to produce the dosh that we're going to need to pay for the poorest. And the longer I live, the more I think that we all have a duty to each other. — Boris Johnson

I'm not a God, I make mistakes. — Boris Becker

If you watch it, you should watch it with other players and try to find moves, like it was before. Now on many sites you watch together with the computer and the pleasure is gone. — Boris Gelfand

I was never interested in being a rock star. I always wanted to be Boris Karloff. — Gene Simmons

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup. — Boris Pasternak

In my heart of hearts I knew I was wrong. The World Cup was about to begin in the United States. The planet was interested in nothing else. And in any case, whatever happened in Rwanda, it would always be the same old story of blacks beating up on each other. Even Africans would say, during half-time of every match, "They're embarrassing us, they should stop killing each other like that." Then they'll go on to something else. [9-10] — Boubacar Boris Diop

The psycho-physiological hypothesis is both inductively and deductively the sine qua non of the science of psychology. — Boris Sidis

At the wheel, Hamid Abdul was trying not to watch them. Hamid, his immigrant brother. How Slava was exceeding his immigrant brief with this fine-skinned American specimen. See Slava take the milk of this American skin into his mouth, Hamid. Look at her fingers disappear from your rearview mirror. We are miscegenating with the natives, Hamid, we are assimilating, are we not? — Boris Fishman

This Mr. Right." Freddie leaned forward and rested his hands, still flushed from washing dishes, on his knees. "It has been months and months, and you are still ashamed to introduce us? He must be Mr. Wrong-But-It-Feels-So-Right. — Laurie Boris

February
Boris Pasternak
It's February. Get ink. Weep.
Write the heart out about it, sing
Another song of February
While raucous slush burns black with spring.
Six grivnas* for a buggy ride
Past booming bells, on screaming gears,
Out to a place where drizzles fall
Louder than any ink or tears
Where like a flock of charcoal pears,
A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry
From trees to puddles, knock dry grief
Into the deep end of the eye.
A thaw patch blackens underfoot.
The wind is gutted with a scream.
True verses are the most haphazard,
Rhyming the heart out on a theme.
*Grivna: a unit of currency. — Boris Pasternak

I lead a life of blameless domesticity and always have done. — Boris Johnson

Feeling alone among the many is normal.

Feeling many when you are alone, calls for a professional help. A qualified shrink can always shrink your ego down to being again alone.
— Boris Zubry

In the Soviet Union, for instance, the pressure on the chess stars was immense. When Boris Spassky came home after losing that match, he found he no longer had an apartment in Moscow. — Liz Garbus

For example, computer defends well, but for humans its is harder to defend than attack, particularly with the modern time control. — Boris Spassky

As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf. — Boris Pasternak

It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time. — Boris Johnson

One does not have to forgive if forgiveness is not one of his virtues. But one can forget and never come back to the issue. — Boris Zubry