Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

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Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring — thus he erred himself.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's but by tomorrow's. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck. He can be dragged down from the mast and put to tending the boilers or working the capstan, but that will not change anything: the mast will remain, and the next man on the masthead will see what the first has seen.
In a storm, you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst of storm today, and SOS signals come from every side.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
"Fog.. So very.."
"Do you like fog"
She used the ancient, long-forgotten "thou" — the "thou" of the master to the slave. It entered into me slowly, sharply. Yes, I was a slave, and this, too, was necessary, was good.
"Yes, good.." I said aloud to myself. And then to her," I hate fog. I am afraid of it."
"That means you love it. 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."

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yesterday, there was a tsar, and there were slaves; today there is no tsar, but the slaves remain; tomorrow there will be only tsars. We march in the name of tomorrow's free man — the royal man. 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. Wars, imperialist and civil, have turned man into material for warfare, into a number, a cipher. Man is forgotten, for the sake of the sabbath. We want to recall something else to mind: that the sabbath is for man.
The only weapon worthy of man — of tomorrows's man — is the word.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity — but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
The works of the highest faculty of man, judgment, is always directed toward the constant limiting of the infinite, toward the breaking up of the infinite into comfortably digestible portions, differentials.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom -- that is, in disorganized wildness.

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

Yevgeny Zamyatin
The circles are at times golden, sometimes they are bloody, but all have 360 degrees. They go from 0 degrees to 10 degrees, 20 degrees, 200 degrees, 360 degrees — and then again 0 degrees. Yes we have returned to zero. But for a mathematically working mind it is obvious that this zero is different.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
There are no more fortunate and happy people than those who live according to the correct, eternal laws of the multiplication table.

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
Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates. All realistic forms are projections along the fixed, plane coordinates of Euclid's world. These coordinates do not exist in nature. Nor does the finite, fixed world; this world is a convention, an abstraction, an unreality. And therefore Realism — be it "socialist" or "bourgeois" — is unreal. Far closer to reality is projection along speeding, curved surfaces — as in the new mathematics and the new art. Realism that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, non-objectivity. Only the camera lens is objective.

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
Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind....

Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

Yevgeny Zamyatin
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.
I became glass. I saw — within myself.

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
All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.

Yevgeny Zamyatin