I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle of maintaining rational thought amidst overwhelming pressure.
Yevgeny Zamyatin uses the metaphor of a machine to illustrate the human experience of being pushed to one’s limits. He conveys the idea that when faced with intense stress and emotional turmoil, even logic can fail to provide relief, evidenced by the 'sizzling' of cold water on hot bearings. The imagery suggests that without a break or cooling off, a person may reach a breaking point, leading to a sense of impending collapse.
In practice
In a motivational speech about stress management, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of taking breaks.
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Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
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A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
A swami may conceivably follow only the path of dry reasoning, of cold renunciation; but a yogi engages himself in a definite, step-by-step procedure by which the body and mind are disciplined, and the soul liberated.
Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That's morality, that's religion, that's art, that's life.
I have since often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth ... that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; not ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which only can make them be esteemed wise men.
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.
Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.
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