Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Man Quotes

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You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power — he's free again.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nowadays we don't think much of a man's love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving humans too?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The thing is that religion itself cannot but be dynamic which is why "return" is an incorrect term. A return to the forms of religion which perhaps existed a couple of centuries ago is absolutely impossible. On the contrary, in order to combat modern materialistic mores, as religion must, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch. Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A man should build a house with his own hands before before he calls himself an engineer.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What is an optimist? The man who says, "It's worse everywhere else. We're better off than the rest of the world. We've been lucky." He is happy with things as they are and he doesn't torment himself. What is a pessimist? The man who says, "Things are fine everywhere but here. Everyone else is better off than we are. We're the only ones who've had a bad break." He torments himself continually.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Ivanov came to quite the same conclusion, though life supplied him with quite different material to think about. He puts it like this: many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it right; more often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it we despair because our lives seem meaningless… the secret of a great life is often a man's success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them, and so learning to walk in the true path.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Only those who decline to scramble up the ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited — dimly, briefly — by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.
Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see — not yourself — but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn