Top 160 Boris Pasternak Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “There is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as death. Death has nothing to do with us. But you said something about being talented – that it makes one different. Now, that does have something to do with us. And talent in the highest and broadest sense means talent for life.”

— Boris Pasternak

54. “The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.”

— Boris Pasternak

55. “I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.”

— Boris Pasternak

56. “In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.”

— Boris Pasternak

57. “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

58. “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

59. “She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.”

— Boris Pasternak

60. “And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?”

— Boris Pasternak

61. “A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.”

— Boris Pasternak

62. “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breath-takingly serious!”

— Boris Pasternak

63. “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 People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s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

64. “You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction’s path, When life sickens more than disease And boldness is the root of beauty – Which draws us together.”

— Boris Pasternak

65. “I think that collectivization was an erroneous and unsuccessful measure and it was impossible to admit the error. To conceal the failure people had to be cured, by every means of terrorism, of the habit of thinking and judging for themselves, and forced to see what didn’t exist, to assert the very opposite of what their eyes told them.”

— Boris Pasternak

66. “She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new.”

— Boris Pasternak

67. “I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.”

— Boris Pasternak

68. “All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.”

— Boris Pasternak

69. “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

70. “Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death.”

— Boris Pasternak

71. “Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one’s stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.”

— Boris Pasternak

72. “Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.”

— Boris Pasternak

73. “It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.”

— Boris Pasternak

74. “They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns.”

— Boris Pasternak

75. “Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. 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, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.”

— Boris Pasternak

76. “No bad man can be a good poet.”

— Boris Pasternak

77. “The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.”

— Boris Pasternak

78. “I don’t know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics don’t appeal to me. I don’t like people who don’t care about the truth.”

— Boris Pasternak

79. “At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.”

— Boris Pasternak

80. “Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.”

— Boris Pasternak

81. “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.”

— Boris Pasternak

82. “As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.”

— Boris Pasternak

83. “He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.”

— Boris Pasternak

84. “Men who are not free always idealize their bondage.”

— Boris Pasternak

85. “In one corner the piano tuner scattered arpeggios live handfuls of beads.”

— Boris Pasternak

86. “The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.”

— Boris Pasternak

87. “In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.”

— Boris Pasternak

88. “For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and a way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few and, moreover, loved by no one.”

— Boris Pasternak

89. “Then untruth came to the Russian land. 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. The dominion of the ready-made phrase began to grow – first monarchistic, then revolutionary.”

— Boris Pasternak

90. “This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.”

— Boris Pasternak

91. “But sometimes, to enable her to bear her life, she needed the accompaniment of an inward music and she could not always compose it for herself.”

— Boris Pasternak

92. “Or again, take your red banner. You think it’s a flag, isn’t that what you think? Well, it isn’t a flag. It’s the purple kerchief of the death woman, she uses it for luring. And why for luring? She waves it and she nods and winks and lures young men to come and be killed, then she sends famine and plague. That’s what it is. And you went and believed her. You thought it was a flag. You thought it was: “Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.”

— Boris Pasternak

93. “The tsar was pitiable on that gray and warm mountain morning, and it was eerie to think that such timorous reserve and shyness could be the essence of an oppressor, that this weakness could punish and pardon, bind and loose.”

— Boris Pasternak

94. “It’s good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn’t correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn’t fall into any category, if he’s not representative, half of what’s demanded of him is there. He’s free of himself, he has achieved a grain of immortality.”

— Boris Pasternak

95. “Now, as never before, it was clear to him that art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life.”

— Boris Pasternak

96. “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. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov’s crime.”

— Boris Pasternak

97. “Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration.”

— Boris Pasternak

98. “And at this point he made his fatal, terrible mistake. He mistook the spirit of the times, the social, universal evil, for a private and domestic one. He listened to our cliches, to our unnatural official tone, and he thought it was because he was second-rate, a nonentity, that we talked like this. I suppose you find it incredible that such trivial things could matter so much in our married life. You can’t imagine how important this was, what foolish things this childish nonsense made him do.”

— Boris Pasternak

99. “And remember. Never, in any circumstances, must you despair. To hope and to act is our duty in misfortune. Inactive despair is a forgetting and failure of duty.”

— Boris Pasternak

100. “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 us to be a victim.”

— Boris Pasternak