Top 100 Yevgeny Quotes
#1. At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently.
Neal Stephenson
#2. Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
Allen Tate
#3. And all this, all this abroad, all this Europe of yours, it's all just a fantasy, and all of us, while we're abroad, are just a fantasy ... mark my words, you'll see for yourself!' she concluded, almost angrily, as she parted from Yevgeny Pavlovich.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#4. Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'
Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
Kingsley Amis
#5. My feelings are Yevgeny Kafelnikov should take his prize money when he is done here and go and buy some perspective.
Andre Agassi
#6. 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
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#13. How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#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. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Character begins to form at the first pinch of anxiety about ourselves.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#26. Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#27. 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
#30. We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#31. Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht. You can throw everything into it beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, everything you want. What's important is the result, the taste of the borscht.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#38. 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
#39. An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#40. 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
#41. Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me-slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#51. And what if you don't wait? You just drive over the edge yourself? Wouldn't that be the only right thing to do, the one that would solve everything?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#52. And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#53. 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
#54. And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential - I know it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#55. No Jewish blood runs among my blood,but I am as bitterly and hardly hatedby every anti-semiteas if I were a Jew. By thisI am a Russian.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#56. To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#57. But still, how could they write whole libraries about someone like Kant and hardly even notice Taylor-that prophet who could see ten centuries ahead?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#58. I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#59. I think the three years have demonstrated how little this argument has to do with reality.
Yevgeny Primakov
#60. There is no need to fear the strong. All one needs is to know the method of overcoming them. There is a special jujitsu for every strong man.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#62. Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#63. One day posterity will remember these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#64. You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#65. The knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine; the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#67. 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
#68. Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. To feel one's self, to be conscious of one's personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness? Apparently
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#72. The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#73. 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
#74. And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#75. But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#76. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken
errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#77. 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
#78. How can I describe what effect that ancient, absurd, and wonderful rite has upon me when her lips touch mine? Can I find a formula to express that whirlwind which sweeps out of my soul everything, everything save her?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#79. Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#80. 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
#82. Arab League summits often served as forums for letting off steam or ironing out differences. At times the way this took place was the stuff of caricature.
Yevgeny Primakov
#83. 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
#84. All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#85. ... the natural course from nullity to grandeur is to forget that you are a gramme and to feel that you are a millionth part of a ton.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#86. True sport is always a duel, a duel with nature, with one's own fear, with one's own fatigue, a duel in which the body and the mind are strengthened.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#88. 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
#89. It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#90. I stopped and listened. But all I could hear was.. a kind of thudding, and not in me but somewhere near me ... my heart.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#91. They tell me, shaking their heads:
"You should be kinder. You are somehow furious".
I used to be kind. It didn't last long.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#92. When there is freedom of speech, I've found that the majority of people really have nothing to say.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#97. The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#98. 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
#99. There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
