Top 160 Boris Pasternak Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.”

— Boris Pasternak

2. “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

— Boris Pasternak

3. “I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.”

— Boris Pasternak

4. “Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.”

— Boris Pasternak

5. “We’re all time’s captives, hostages to eternity.”

— Boris Pasternak

6. “And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.”

— Boris Pasternak

7. “They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.”

— Boris Pasternak

8. “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.”

— Boris Pasternak

9. “For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.”

— Boris Pasternak

10. “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

11. “The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.”

— Boris Pasternak

12. “Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently.”

— Boris Pasternak

13. “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.”

— Boris Pasternak

14. “How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?”

— Boris Pasternak

15. “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.”

— Boris Pasternak

16. “To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.”

— Boris Pasternak

17. “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

18. “Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.”

— Boris Pasternak

19. “An unshared happiness is not happiness.”

— Boris Pasternak

20. “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

21. “What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.”

— Boris Pasternak

22. “He comes as a guest to the feast of existence, and knows that what matters is not how much he inherits but how he behaves at the feast, and what people remember and love him for.”

— Boris Pasternak

23. “He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.”

— Boris Pasternak

24. “Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.”

— Boris Pasternak

25. “Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.”

— Boris Pasternak

26. “I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.”

— Boris Pasternak

27. “As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.”

— Boris Pasternak

28. “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

29. “Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.”

— Boris Pasternak

30. “Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.”

— Boris Pasternak

31. “Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.”

— Boris Pasternak

32. “You are eternity’s hostage A captive of mine.”

— Boris Pasternak

33. “As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.”

— Boris Pasternak

34. “I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.”

— Boris Pasternak

35. “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

36. “I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.”

— Boris Pasternak

37. “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.”

— Boris Pasternak

38. “The main trouble, the root of the future evil, was loss of faith in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the urgings of their moral sense was gone, that now they had to sing to the general tune and live by foreign notions imposed on everyone.”

— Boris Pasternak

39. “It’s alleged that our scourge of God and punishment from heaven, Commissar Strelnikov, is Antipov come back to life. A legend, of course. And it’s not like him.”

— Boris Pasternak

40. “Failure to love is almost like murder.”

— Boris Pasternak

41. “Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people’s songs.”

— Boris Pasternak

42. “In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.”

— Boris Pasternak

43. “I have the impression that if he didn’t complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.”

— Boris Pasternak

44. “It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.”

— Boris Pasternak

45. “No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.”

— Boris Pasternak

46. “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

47. “Her dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.”

— Boris Pasternak

48. “In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.”

— Boris Pasternak

49. “While the music played a whole eternity went by like life in a novel.”

— Boris Pasternak

50. “And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.”

— Boris Pasternak