The Bright Flame of Consciousness
...There are moments when all the intellectual and spiritual faculties, painfully overstrained, seem suddenly to blaze with the bright flame of consciousness. At these times the troubled soul, languishing with a pressentiment, a foretaste of the future, has something akin to a prophetic vision. And the whole being longs to live, it cries out for life, and the heart, alight with blind, desperate hope, will invoke the future, with all its mistery and incertitude, its storm and tempests, if only it will bring life.
Fiodor Dostoievski, in 'Netochka Nezvanova'