Yevgeny Zamyatin quotes - page 2

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. (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
Of course, to wound oneself is difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive, living today as yesterday and yesterday as today is still more difficult.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to up-raised arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons - horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?" This is what children ask. But then children are the boldest philosophers.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Today is doomed to die - because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Realism that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, non-objectivity.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane - a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
Ask point blank: What is revolution?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
This is the path of evolution - until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring stone which have been raised upon it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Realism - be it "socialist" or "bourgeois" - is unreal.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one. (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Yevgeny Zamyatin