Top 36 We By Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes
#1. Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me-slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Oh, to the deuce with knowledge. Your much-heralded knowledge is but a form of cowardice. It is a fact! Yes, you want to encircle the infinite with a wall, and you fear to cast a glance behind the wall.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#9. You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#10. Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#12. 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
#13. When man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom. And now, just as we have gotten rid of it (on the cosmic scale, centuries are, of course, no more than "just"), some wretched halfwits ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#14. 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
#15. When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#16. In the ancient world, this was understood by the Christians, our only (if very imperfect) predecessors: Humility is a virtue, pride a vice; We comes from God, I from the Devil.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#17. We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow
and judge today in the name of tomorrow.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#26. 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
#27. The moon ... is a mad woman holding up her dress So that her white belly shines. Haughty, Impregnable, Ridiculous, Silent and white as a debauched queen.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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