Top 100 Zamyatin Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. ... 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
#13. All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#21. 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
#22. The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#28. O-90 sat over the notebook, her head leaning toward her left shoulder, and making such an effort that her tongue was pushing her left cheek out. She looked like such a child, so charming. And so I felt good all over, clear, simple ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#29. Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#30. Imagine yourself standing on a shore: waves rhythmically rising, rising, and then suddenly they stay there, they set, they freeze.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#31. The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring
thus he erred himself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. She was like a candle that just went out. All the circles that made her up suddenly got lopsided and warped.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#39. Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#40. Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#41. Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.
("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#42. And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#43. Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#44. The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#45. 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
#46. By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#48. Final things are for children, because infinity scares children, and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#49. Let my notes, like the most sensitive seismograph, record the curve of even the most insignificant vibrations of my brain: for it is precisely such vibrations that are sometimes the forewarning of...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#50. The moon hangs alien, heavy, like a lock on a door; the door is tightly shut. ("The North")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#58. We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. 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
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#82. I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#83. 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
#84. To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#85. And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential - I know it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#98. Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me-slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#99. 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
#100. An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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