Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes
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Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .
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We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed.
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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.
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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)
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You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
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Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.
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Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")
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In adopting the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its intellectual value, and brought into it elements of social philosophy and science. In his own field - though, of course, on a proportionately lesser scale - Wells may be likened to Dostoyevsky, who took the form of the cheap detective novel and infused it with brilliant psychological analysis.
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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.
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Individual consciousness is just sickness.
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Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
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There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.
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And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.
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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.
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We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")