Top 100 Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes
#1. The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#2. They say there is a kind of flower that blooms only once a century, Then couldn't there be one that flowers only once every thousand years - or once every ten thousand years? Maybe there are and we just don't know it because today is itself that once-in-a-thousand-year moment.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#4. And tomorrow
who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows
it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#5. A knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of all of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine, the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots, and the path of paradox lies along the blade of the knife--the only path worthy of the mind without fear. . . .
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#6. Great Benefactor! How absurd- to want pain! Can there be anyone who doesn't know that pain is a negative quality, and that if you add them up it reduces the sum we call happiness? so it follows ...
But ... nothing follows. The slate is clean. Naked.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#7. Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#8. Who knows who you are ... A person is a novel: you don't know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#9. How do you know nonsense isn't a good thing? if human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily previous could have come from it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#10. The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#11. The moon climbed out of the ravine, blue, skinny, as if it had been fed on nothing but skimmed milk. It climbed out, and quickly slithered up and up along the finest thread-away from trouble, and on the very top it huddled, crouching on thin legs. ("The Protectress Of Sinners")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#12. To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#13. Get the paper quick, maybe it's there ... I read the paper with my eyes (that's not mistake: My eyes are like a pen now, or a calculator, something you hold in your hands, something you feel is not you- a tool).
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#16. We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#17. Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#18. Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#19. If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer ... ("Letter To Stalin")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#20. And it seems to me that everyone is like me - they're all afraid of the slightest movement ... Everyone's sitting all closed up in his own glass cage waiting for something.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#21. If the speed of an aero equals zero, the aero is motionless; if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#22. They say there are flowers that bloom only once every hundred years. Why shouldn't there be some that bloom only once every thousand, every ten thousand years? Maybe we just haven't heard about them up to now because this very day is that once-in-a-thousand-years.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#23. It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#24. And then here I am back down, right beside the stone, my body rumpled, happy, crumpled as if it had just made love. Sun. Voices from above. I-330's smile.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#25. I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#26. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#27. He plashed away, like paddles on water, toward the door, and every step he made returned to me gradually my feet, my hands, my fingers. My soul again spread equally throughout my body. I was able to breathe.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#28. The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#29. At night numbers must sleep; it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#30. To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#31. I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#32. And what is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn't got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others;
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#33. Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#34. I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom
that is, in disorganized wildness.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#35. Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#36. The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#37. And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#38. Cruel', O'Kelly laughed, 'it's cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of God's mercy, then it's his gift of making us unable to lie.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#39. My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#40. Now ... what I feel these in my brain is just like ... some kind of foreign body ... like having a very thin little eyelash in your eye. You feel generally okay, but that eye with the last in it-you can't get it off your mind for a second.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#41. The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#42. I feel myself. But it's only the eye with a lash in it, the swollen finger, the infected tooth that feels itself, is conscious of its own individual being. The healthy eye or finger or tooth doesn't seem to exist. So it's clear, isn't it? Self-consciousness is just a disease.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#43. The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#44. Why? But why don't we have feathers? Or Wings? Nothing but the shoulder blades where wings would be attached? Why, because we no longer need wings. We've got aeros. Wings would only be in the way. Wings are for flying, but we have nowhere to fly to, we've already flown there, we've found it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#45. The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolutionary, the most immortal of them all.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#46. Final things are for children, because infinity scares children, and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#48. I felt I hadn't breathed since early morning, that my heart had not beat-and only now for the first time I took a breath, only now the floodgates in my chest opened...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#49. What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they'd nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#50. She was like a candle that just went out. All the circles that made her up suddenly got lopsided and warped.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#52. We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#53. All their Immanuel Kants together couldn't do it! It didn't enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#54. A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd be no point in reading ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#55. Was it not I who populated with them all these pages - just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#56. Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#57. They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. ("The North")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#58. A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#59. Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you're right, it's a child's question, just as it should be.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#60. Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#61. You will place the benevolent yoke of reason on the necks of the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in that primitive state known as freedom.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#62. True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#63. Listen." I tugged at my neighbor. "Just listen to me! You must-you must give me an answer: out there, where your finite universe ends! What is out there, beyond it?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#64. Well, fallen angel. Now you're quite ruined," she said, reverting to the formal you. "No, aren't you afraid? Well, goodbye! You'll get back on your own, right?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#65. Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#66. The speed of a tongue should always go some seconds behind the speed of thought, never the other way around.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#67. A human being is like a novel: until the last page you don't know how it will end. Or it wouldn't be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#68. There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#70. Yesterday was to me like the paper through which chemists filter their solutions: all suspended particles, all that is superfluous remains on this paper. And this morning I went downstairs freshly distilled, transparent.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#71. Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#72. The only reason I'm writing this down is to show how human reason, even very sharp and exact human reason, can get crazily confused and thrown off the track.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#73. You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#74. How awful for you! By the looks of it, you've developed a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#75. How do you know that nonsense isn't a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#76. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe", if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is-the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#77. Their mistake was the mistake of Galileo. He was right that the earth revolves around the sun, but he didn't know that the entire solar system revolves around yet another center; he didn't know that the real orbit of the earth, as opposed to the relative orbit, is by no means some naive circle ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#78. What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons ... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?".
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#79. A point contains more unknowns than anything else; it need but stir, move, and it may turn into thousands of curves, thousands of bodies. I
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#80. There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#81. The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#82. The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#83. All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#84. bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction known as happiness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#85. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#86. Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#87. You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#88. Everyone has to go mad, it's essential fir everyone to go mad - as soon as possible! It's essential - I know.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#89. There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#90. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. ("Tomorrow")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#91. Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#92. Besides, I can't, I no longer have the strength to destroy this painful piece of myself, which might turn out to be the piece I value most.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#93. It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#94. If [modern artists] hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#95. You don't look normal, dear. You look sick. Because sick and not normal are the same thing. You're destroying yourself, and no one is going to tell you that - no one.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#96. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#97. Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#99. During the first firing a dozen or so numbers from the dock neglected to get out of the way - nothing remained of them except some crumbs and soot.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#100. What is it to you if I don't want others to want for me, if I want to want myself - if I want the impossible ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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