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Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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
Understand
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Power
Hard
More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Every human act can be disguised with a coating of gilt.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Not all of me shall die.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We have been fortunate enough to live at a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
... once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
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
Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
