Top 180 Boris Pasternak Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Man is a wolf to man.”

— Boris Pasternak

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

— Boris Pasternak

153. “But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren’t at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren’t happy with anything that’s on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren’t trained for anything else, they don’t know anything except that.”

— Boris Pasternak

154. “She has more names than petticoats.”

— Boris Pasternak

155. “Could it be that for a moment of too-broad sympathy he had enslaved himself forever?”

— Boris Pasternak

156. “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

157. “They had become too conceited to be capable of normal human feelings.”

— Boris Pasternak

158. “The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.”

— Boris Pasternak

159. “Children are unconstrainedly sincere and not ashamed of the truth, while we, from fear of seeming backward, are ready to betray what’s most dear, to praise the repulsive, and to say yes to the incomprehensible.”

— Boris Pasternak

160. “You and I are like Adam and Eve, the first human beings, who had nothing to cover themselves with when the world began, and we are now just as unclothed and homeless at its end.”

— Boris Pasternak

161. “Contemporary trends of thought have imagined art to be a fountain, whereas it is a sponge. They have decided that art ought to gush forth, whereas it should absorb and become saturated. They think it can be broken down into means of depiction, whereas it is composed of organs of perception. Its proper task is to be always among the spectators and to look more purely, receptively and faithfully than all others.”

— Boris Pasternak

162. “All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy.”

— Boris Pasternak

163. “What must one be, to rave year after year with delirious feverishness about nonexistent, long-extinct themes, and to know nothing, to see nothing around one!”

— Boris Pasternak

164. “You wouldn’t believe what spite and superstition there is in the world.”

— Boris Pasternak

165. “Remember, there are neither honest people nor friends anymore. Still less anyone knowledgeable.”

— Boris Pasternak

166. “They came out of the vault intoxicated, not by the mere thought of food, but by the consciousness that they too were of use in the world and did not live in vain, and had deserved the praise and thanks which Tonya would shower on them at home.”

— Boris Pasternak

167. “Besides, he had more serious worries. He had suspected for some time that he suffered from an incurable disease.”

— Boris Pasternak

168. “The cart was grotesque, and automatically attracted attention. A peasant was walking beside it. The cart listed sharply to one side and moved forward at a walking pace. And over all its groaning plunder hung the wet, leaden word “town”; it brought to life in the girl’s head a number of images as fleeting as the cold October brilliance which flew along the street and fell upon the water.”

— Boris Pasternak

169. “I understand intimacy and life quite differently.”

— Boris Pasternak

170. “It has already been so several times in history. What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turned into the Russian revolution.”

— Boris Pasternak

171. “I don’t know the reason, but the reminder of what life is comes so timely at the moment of taking leave of it and on the threshold of its return.”

— Boris Pasternak

172. “Um homem a ferros tende sempre a idealizar a sua escravatura.”

— Boris Pasternak

173. “Oh, what love this was, free, unprecedented, unlike anything else! They thought the way other people sing.”

— Boris Pasternak

174. “Drop all this foolishness. Once and for all. Do not play the simpleton, do not be coy, do not lower your eyes bashfully. It will end badly someday. The dreadful line is very close here. One step, and you fall straight into the abyss. That is where the whole evil lies. Do not be embarrassed to refuse. Pretend that you never learned to dance or have broken your leg.”

— Boris Pasternak

175. “One day Larisa Fyodorovna left the house and did not come back again. Evidently she was arrested on the street in those days or died or vanished no one knew where, forgotten under some nameless number on subsequently lost lists, in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

— Boris Pasternak

176. “I love you beyond mind or memory or measure.”

— Boris Pasternak

177. “I should say the summit of contemporary university knowledge in two fields, mathematics and the humanities. That’s no joke!”

— Boris Pasternak

178. “I mean to say that there was, in fact, something unhealthy in the life of well-to-do people. No end of superfluity. Superfluous furniture and superfluous rooms in the houses, superfluous refinement of feelings, superfluous expressions.”

— Boris Pasternak

179. “When they jumped down on the tracks, stretched their limbs, picked flowers, and took a little run, they all had the feeling that the place had just emerged only thanks to the stop, and that the swampy meadow with its knolls, the wide river, with a beautiful house and a church on the high bank opposite, would not be there had it not been for the accident that had taken place.”

— Boris Pasternak

180. “Their love was great. Most people experience love without becoming aware of the extraordinary nature of this emotion. But to them – and this made them exceptional – the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of eternity were moments of revelation, of continually new discoveries about themselves and life.”

— Boris Pasternak

181. “Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories.”

— Boris Pasternak

182. “The earth at the doctor’s feet, inside the trench and in the ruts of the forest road, was hard with ground frost and heaped with small dry willow leaves, curled up in little scrolls. The autumn smelled of these brown, bitter leaves and of many other things. Greedily he breathed in the mixed peppery smell of frostbitten apples, bitter dry twigs, sweetish damp earth, and the blue September mist that smoked like the fumes of a recently extinguished fire.”

— Boris Pasternak

183. “To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune. To do nothing and to despair is to neglect our duty.”

— Boris Pasternak