Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Age: 89 †
Born: 1918
Born: December 11
Died: 2008
Died: January 1
Historian
Militant
Military Personnel
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Public Figure
School Teacher
Screenwriter
Writer
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Experience
Art
Substitute
Substitutes
Sole
Lived
Literature
More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? ... It seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom carrying a register as that bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
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
Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
... any country that is not careful can be seized.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Truth seldom is pleasant it is almost invariably bitter.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Economic growth is not only unncessary, but ruinous.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
