Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• The world is kept alive only by heretics.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Alive

  As translated in A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, 1919.

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• 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

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• 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

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• Only the rational and useful is beautiful.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Beauty, Beautiful, Rational

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• 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

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• An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Truth

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• 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, Science, Men

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (1993). “We: New Edition”, p.107, Penguin

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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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Tongue, Reverse, Ought

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

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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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

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• 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

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2007). “We”, p.103, Modern Library

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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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Hate

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• Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Issues, Morality, Court

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• 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

  Yevgeny Zamyatin “We”, Two-Gunner Pulp Press

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• 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, Glasses, Flames

  "We". Book by Yevgeny Zamyatin, D-503, 1921.

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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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Wise, Art

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

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

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Men

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• 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

  Dog, Lonely, Moon

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• 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

  Yevgeny Zamyatin “We”, Two-Gunner Pulp Press

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• 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

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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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Lying, Style, Balance

  "Islanders: And, the Fisher of Men". Book by Yevgeny Zamyatin, p.37, January 1, 1985.

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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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

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• 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

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• The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Writing

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• 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

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (1993). “We: New Edition”, p.24, Penguin

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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.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Moving

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