Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

We comes from God, I from the Devil.

The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)

The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?

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.

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.

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.

All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .

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.

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.

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.

There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.

The world is kept alive only by heretics.

Explosions are not comfortable.

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.

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")

An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.

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.

The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring - thus he erred himself.

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.

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.

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.

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.

Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.

The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

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?".

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.

Individual consciousness is just sickness.

There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.

The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.

The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.