Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes
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The world is kept alive only by heretics.
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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.
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All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
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The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.
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The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
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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")
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All women are lips, nothing but lips.
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The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.
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The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
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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.
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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.
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To the feudal aristocracy and the aristocracy of the spirit, nobility derives from diametrically opposite sources. The glory of the feudal aristocrat is in being a link in the longest possible chain of ancestors. The glory of the aristocrat of the spirit is in having no ancestors - or having as few as possible. If an artist is his own ancestor, if he has only descendents, he enters history as a genius; if he has few ancestors, or is related to them distantly, he enters history as a talent.
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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.
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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?
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The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
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The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
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There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.
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Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy).
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Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number? Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.
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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.
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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.
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Only the rational and useful is beautiful.
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I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
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In order to write about the machine you have to know it, to live with it, to love it (or hate it). I think that true writing could be done on industrial subjects by people who work in industry, who are firmly linked with it. But ... and here is the opposite 'but', the technology of literary craftsmanship is itself a very fine and complex matter. Qualified specialists from industry prove themselves dilettantes in the field of literature. The needed synthesis is not yet in sight.