Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

Only the rational and useful is beautiful.

what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

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.

To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

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.

All women are lips, nothing but lips.

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.

Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.

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.

Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.

The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.

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.

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.

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.

I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom -- that is, in disorganized wildness.

Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.

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?

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.

It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

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.

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.

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.

Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

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.

You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.

Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers are invariably children.

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...

...sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.

The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time.

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

And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.

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.

And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.