Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• 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

  Inspirational, Art, Dreamer

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2007). “We”, p.6, Modern Library

• I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Literature

• Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Literature, Architecture, Painting

• All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty". The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Strong

• 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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Opposites

• What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?".

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Fearless

• There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Men

• There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Two

• 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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Wise, Art

  "A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin". Book edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, 1970.

• The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Order

• 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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

• We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Men

  "A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin". Book edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, "Tomorrow" (1919), 1970.

• Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Literature

• Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Lying

• 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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Names

• Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Reality

• When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

• None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Writing

• To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Adventure

• 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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Hate

• 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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

• 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).

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Law

  "A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin". 1970.

• The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Literature

• Every artist of importance creates his own world, with its own laws - creates and shapes it in his own shape and image, and no one else's. This is why it is difficult to fit the artist into a world that has already been created, a seven-day, fixed and solidified world: he will inevitably slip out of the set of laws and paragraphs, he will be a heretic.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Law

• The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Flames

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2007). “We”, p.9, Modern Library

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