Yevgeny Zamyatin 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.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

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

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 be worth reading.

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.

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.

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

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.

knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith

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.

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

Strictly speaking, she was out of order. This dear 0-, how shall 1 say it?
The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts-at any rate not the reverse.

Then how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

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.

In the ancient world, this was understood by the Christians, our only (if very imperfect) predecessors: Humility is a virtue, pride a vice; We comes from God, I from the Devil.

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.

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

Great Benefactor! How absurd- to want pain! Can there be anyone who doesn't know that pain is a negative quality, and that if you add them up it reduces the sum we call happiness? so it follows...

But...nothing follows. The slate is clean. Naked.