Quote

A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.

Boris Pasternak

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Boris Pasternak
Age: 70 †
Born: 1890
Born: February 10
Died: 1960
Died: May 30
Novelist
Pianist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Moscow
Russian SFSR
Holiwis
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Light
Attempt
Asleep
Trying
Conscious
Directed
Way
Produce
Crash
Locomotive
Like
Consciousness
Apply
Locomotives
Turn
Inward
Headlights
Sure
Stomach
Digestion
Turns
Poison
Insomnia
Fall
Upset
Outward

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

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And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
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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.
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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.
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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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No bad man can be a good poet.
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How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
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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.
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If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.
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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
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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.
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An unshared happiness is not happiness.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
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Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
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Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?
Boris Pasternak
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Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
Boris Pasternak
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That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Boris Pasternak
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Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
Boris Pasternak
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She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
Boris Pasternak
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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
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It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
Boris Pasternak