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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Turn
Inward
Headlights
Sure
Stomach
Digestion
Turns
Poison
Insomnia
Fall
Upset
Outward
Light
Attempt
Asleep
Trying
Conscious
Directed
Way
Produce
Crash
Locomotive
Like
Consciousness
Apply
Locomotives

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

Image
The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
Boris Pasternak
Image
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Boris Pasternak
Image
At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
Boris Pasternak
Image
Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
Boris Pasternak