110+ Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes On Education, Government And Technology

Yevgeny Zamyatin was a Russian novelist who is best known for his dystopian novel We. He was born in 1884 in Lebedyan, Russia and studied naval engineering in St. Petersburg. His works often explored themes of social criticism, alienation, and the individual's struggle against the oppressive forces of a totalitarian society. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin on education, government, technology.

Top 10 Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

1. The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)
2. The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")
3. Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.
4. True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
5. We comes from God, I from the Devil.
6. A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
7. Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.
8. We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")
9. 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.
10. The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.

Yevgeny Zamyatin Short Quotes

• I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
• If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
• Explosions are not comfortable.
• The world is kept alive only by heretics.
• Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.
• Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
• Only the rational and useful is beautiful.
• Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
• The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring - thus he erred himself.
• An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.

Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes About Love

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy... — 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

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. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. ("The North") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being. — 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 knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex. — 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. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. — 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 inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow -- and judge today in the name of tomorrow. — 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

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it. — 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

Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolutionary, the most immortal of them all. — 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

You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

What is it to you if I don't want others to want for me, if I want to want myself - if I want the impossible. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Literature is painting, architecture, and music. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

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 mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

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

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

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

All women are lips, nothing but lips. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they'd nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

The moon ... is a mad woman holding up her dress So that her white belly shines. Haughty, Impregnable, Ridiculous, Silent and white as a debauched queen. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Individual consciousness is just sickness. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god. — 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

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

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness? — Yevgeny Zamyatin

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul. — 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

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

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

And tomorrow--who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows--it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable. — 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

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

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

Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Life Lessons by Yevgeny Zamyatin

1. Yevgeny Zamyatin's works emphasize the importance of individual freedom and creativity, and the dangers of oppressive systems and conformity.
2. His dystopian novel We serves as a warning against the dangers of totalitarianism and the need for independent thought and action.
3. Through his works, Zamyatin encourages readers to think for themselves and to challenge oppressive systems in order to create a better world.