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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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.
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The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
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As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
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To be a woman is a great adventure To drive men mad is a heroic thing.
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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.
Boris Pasternak
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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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Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
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The whole wide world is a cathedral I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
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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
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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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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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The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
Boris Pasternak
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
Boris Pasternak
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And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.
Boris Pasternak
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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
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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
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Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
Boris Pasternak
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I am alone all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
Boris Pasternak
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During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
Boris Pasternak