Top 160 Boris Pasternak Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”

— Boris Pasternak

103. “Where the pond’s an open secret, where apple-trees whisper of waves, where the garden hanging on piles, holds the sky before its face.”

— Boris Pasternak

104. “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

105. “Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.”

— Boris Pasternak

106. “You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.”

— Boris Pasternak

107. “No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.”

— Boris Pasternak

108. “How can you be yourself when you are being blown in a million different directions you can’t control?”

— Boris Pasternak

109. “Poetry searches for music amidst the tumult of the dictionary.”

— Boris Pasternak

110. “Beyond, pines hold sermons.”

— Boris Pasternak

111. “Aren’t we sensitive! We’re something special. We’re cultured. It’s too much for us.”

— Boris Pasternak

112. “He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men – it isn’t their fault if life disappoints them later.”

— Boris Pasternak

113. “They all laughed and clapped, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he had no idea what he was saying, so great was his foreboding of misfortune and his feeling of powerlessness over the future, however great his thirst for goodness and his capacity for happiness.”

— Boris Pasternak

114. “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”

— Boris Pasternak

115. “It’s only in mediocre books 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?”

— Boris Pasternak

116. “The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia’s letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.”

— Boris Pasternak

117. “You vanished, leaving me alone, Without a trace or explanation. When many years had passed me by, Your voice awakened me by chance. I sat and read Your Word all night And came to life out of a trance. Since then I feel more drawn to people, To blend into the morning crowd.”

— Boris Pasternak

118. “I’ve noticed more than once that it is precisely things we have barely noticed in the daytime, thoughts not brought to clarity, words spoken without feeling and left without attention, that return at night clothed in flesh and blood, and become the subjects of dreams, as if in compensation for our neglect of them in the daytime.”

— Boris Pasternak

119. “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

120. “But all the time one and the same boundlessly identical life fills the universe and is renewed every hour in countless combinations and transformations. Here you have fears about whether you will resurrect, yet you already resurrected when you were born, and you didn’t notice it.”

— Boris Pasternak

121. “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

122. “It occurred to her that when people were drunk they always tried to impersonate drunkards, and the drunker they were the more they overacted.”

— Boris Pasternak

123. “Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.”

— Boris Pasternak

124. “The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. In the case of some men, compassion for a woman exceeds all measure and transports her to an unreal, entirely imaginary world.”

— Boris Pasternak

125. “And while one early morning, I, Behind the desk, delayed each sentence, The winter came and passed me by With some unrecognized resemblance.”

— Boris Pasternak

126. “You said that facts are meaningless, unless meanings are put into them. Well, Christianity, the mystery of the individual, is precisely what must be put into the facts to make them meaningful.”

— Boris Pasternak

127. “The trains either don’t run at all or come so full that it is impossible to get on them.”

— Boris Pasternak

128. “Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.”

— Boris Pasternak

129. “Despite the absence of fetters, chains, and guards, the doctor was forced to submit to his unfreedom, which looked imaginary.”

— Boris Pasternak

130. “The ancient world was settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.”

— Boris Pasternak

131. “Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.”

— Boris Pasternak

132. “The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alchohol stove.”

— Boris Pasternak

133. “But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?”

— Boris Pasternak

134. “We must discover security within ourselves.”

— Boris Pasternak

135. “The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.”

— Boris Pasternak

136. “The position could not have been made clearer, whatever had been said, not only to those directly involved but to Sasha, Nyusha and Bacchus; their painful embarrassment communicated itself even to the mare, the foal, the golden rays of the setting sun and the gnats buzzing and swarming around Helen’s face and neck.”

— Boris Pasternak

137. “I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one’s speciality seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish.”

— Boris Pasternak

138. “As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.”

— Boris Pasternak

139. “That’s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It’s forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won’t take it.”

— Boris Pasternak

140. “And the strong are dominated by the weak and the ignoble.”

— Boris Pasternak

141. “Only the superfluous is dirty.”

— Boris Pasternak

142. “She had once been the belle of her circle of small tradesmen and salesmen, but now her little pig eyes with their swollen lids could scarcely open.”

— Boris Pasternak

143. “They did not know that the misfortune of having average taste is a great deal worse than the misfortune of having no taste at all.”

— Boris Pasternak

144. “I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one’s slant accordingly – at least once every ten years. The great heroic devotion to one point of view is very alien to me – it’s a lack of humility. Mayakovsky killed himself because his pride would not be reconciled with something new happening within himself – or around him.”

— Boris Pasternak

145. “I have never understood those dreams of a completely original form of expression. The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say. Then he uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is translated from within.”

— Boris Pasternak

146. “He craved an idea, inspired yet concrete, that would show a clear path and change the world for the better, an idea as unmistakable to a child or an ignorant fool as lightning or a roll of thunder. He craved for something new.”

— Boris Pasternak

147. “Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.”

— Boris Pasternak

148. “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

149. “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.”

— Boris Pasternak

150. “Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great.”

— Boris Pasternak