Yevgeny Zamyatin famous quotes

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

#Dreamer #Literature #Rebel

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

#Bitterness #Entropy #Remedy

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.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Reading #Men #People

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Revolution #Finals #Infinite

Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Children #Philosophy #Naked

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

#Envy #Bliss #Fractions

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

#Goal #Needs #Fear Nothing

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

#Soul #Shapes #Looks

I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Air #White #Water

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

#Mind #Essentials

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

#Forever #Gold #Complexity

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

#Art #Philosophy #Way

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

#Hate #Stronger

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Literature #Architecture #Painting

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

#Fear #Book #Differences

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

#World #Hunger #Masters

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

#Eye #Cutting #Healthy

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.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Squares #Roots #World

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

#Yellow #What If #Life Is

She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me — and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this 'must'. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Sweet #Pain #Men

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

#Soul #Way

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Freedom #Mean #Men

Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Lying #Animal #Finding Yourself

knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Infallibility

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

#Queens #Moon #White

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

#Mean #Men #Knives

How do you know that nonsense isn't a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Nonsense #Good Things #Century

Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Children #Brave #Philosopher

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

#Tongue #Reverse

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

#Men #Hatred #Literature

And why do you think that foolishness is bad? 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

#Thinking #Century #Humans

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

#Reality #Men #Doubt

Explosions are not comfortable.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Preparation #Explosions

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

#Thinking #Make You Think #Age

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Art #Eye #Writing

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

#Love #Kind #Life Is

Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Wall #Knowledge #Mean

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

#Freedom #People #Stuff

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

#Art #Purpose #Organize

I was born with the wrong sign In the wrong house With the wrong ascendancy I took the wrong road That led to the wrong tendencies I was in the wrong place at the wrong time For the wrong reason and the wrong rhyme On the wrong day of the wrong week I used the wrong method with the wrong technique Wrong
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#House #Technique #Reason

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

#Numbers #Revolution #Finals

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
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Taste #Inspired #Poet

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals...
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Wall #Mean #Men

Midsummer Night was roasting hot. The shore, of red granite, glowed with the heat; the dark blood of the earth seemed to be rising from below. There was a sharp, unbearable smell of birds, of cod, of green decaying seaweed. Through the mist the huge ruddy sun loomed nearer and nearer. And in the sea, dark blood welled up to meet it - in bloated, rearing, huge white waves. Night. The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade-white woolly fog. And all that you could see was that behind it something red was happening. (The North)
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Eye #Dark #Night

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Love #Flower #Years

The sun's champagne streamed from one body into another. And there was a couple on the green silk of the grass, covered by a raspberry umbrella. Only their feet and a little bit of lace could be seen. In the magnificent universe beneath the raspberry umbrella, with closed eyes, they drank in the sparkling madness. 'Extra! Extra! Zeppelins over the North Sea at 3 o'clock.' But under the umbrella, in the raspberry universe, they were immortal. What did it matter that in another far-away universe people would be killing each other?
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Couple #Eye #Sea

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

#Morning #Being In Love #Caring

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

#Lying #Style #Balance

We comes from God, I from the Devil.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Devil

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

#Two #Choices #Alternatives

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

#World #Womb #Born

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Mistake #Writing #Errors

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

#Lying #Knives #Fearless

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

#Tongue #Speed #Should

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

#Past #Today #Voltage

And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Mistake #Desire #Prejudice

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

#Want #Impossible

The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Lying #Mean #Men

Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Target #Her Smile

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

#Laughter #Eye #Weapons

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

#Long #People #Calluses

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”)
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Flower #Important #Blooming

The moon, our own, earthly moon is bitterly lonely, because it is alone in the sky, always alone, and there is no one to turn to, no one to turn to it. All it can do is ache across the weightless airy ice, across thousands of versts, toward those who are equally lonely on earth, and listen to the endless howling of dogs. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Lonely #Dog #Moon

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

#Fall #Winter #Autumn

They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. ("The North")
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Fall #Eye #Autumn

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Art #Emotional #Self

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

#Girl #Night #Long

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

#Growth #Literature #Essentials

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

#Alive #World #Copernicus

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

#Sleep #Night #Numbers

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

#Way #Being Wrong

The world is kept alive only by heretics.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Alive #World #Heretic

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Art #Moving #Mean

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

#Philosophy #Errors #Machines

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

#Men #Erring #Ancient

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

#Thinking #Flames #Sea

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

#Dark #Men #Soul

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

#Spiritual #World #Stranger

It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Dream #Dust #Orange

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Art #Writing #Architecture

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

#Art #Philosophy #Moving

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

#Mean #Being In Love #Artist

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

#Beautiful #Angel #Devil

All women are lips, nothing but lips.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Lips

The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin

#Logic

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

#America #Track #Poetry

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

#Past #Errors #Risk

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

#Tomorrow #Ends #Unpredictable

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

#Yesterday #Names #Judging

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

#Truth #Errors #Suffering

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

#Truth #Essence #Numbers

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

#Issues #Moral #Court