They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Boris PasternakRead
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.
Interpretation
Trying to overthink personal processes can lead to negative outcomes.
Boris Pasternak’s quote emphasizes the dangers of excessive self-awareness and introspection. He suggests that when we become overly conscious of our own processes—like falling asleep or digesting food—we can inadvertently disrupt them, much like directing the light of a locomotive's headlights inward would cause a crash. The quote serves as a reminder that sometimes, it is better to allow things to happen naturally rather than forcefully trying to control them.
In practice
During a mindfulness workshop discussing the importance of letting thoughts pass without judgment.
They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time, Be crushed by the spirit of light.
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.
Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
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!
Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.
MAJESTY, n. The state and title of a king. Regarded with a just contempt by the Most Eminent Grand Masters, Grand Chancellors, Great Incohonees and Imperial Potentates of the ancient and honorable orders of republican America.
If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity.
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