Doctor Zhivago

“Farewell, my great and dear one, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to throw myself into your cold waves.

“Thank you, thank you. I see your feelings. I don’t deserve them. But you shouldn’t love so sparingly and hurriedly, as if fearing you’ll have to love more strongly later.”

But the point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has been considered up to now that the most important thing in the Gospels is the moral pronouncements and rules, but for me the main thin

“I’ve noticed more than once that it is precisely things we have barely noticed in the daytime, thoughts not brought to clarity, words spoken without feeling and left without attention, that return at night clothed in flesh and blood, and become the subjects of dreams, as if in compensation for our neglect of them in the daytime.”

Our nervous system is not an empty sound, not a fiction. It’s a physical body made up of fibers. Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth.

The unfree man always idealizes his slavery.

Consciousness is a light directed outwards, consciousness lights the way before us so that we don’t stumble. Consciousness is the lit headlights at the front of a moving locomotive. Turn their light inwards and there will be a catastrophe.

“But I’ve gotten sidetracked. I don’t think I’d love you so deeply if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like the righteous ones, who never fell, never stumbled. Their virtue is dead and of little value. The beauty of life has not been revealed to them.”

Man is a wolf to man.