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...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

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
Ground
Perhaps
Feet
Need
Needs
Never
Skepticism
Men
Firm
Provide

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.
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First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Your friend will argue with you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The heart senses who is friend and who is no friend.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Happiness doesn't depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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
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The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant it is almost invariably bitter.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Truth seldom is pleasant it is almost invariably bitter.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We hear a constant clamor for rights, rights, always rights, but so very little about responsibility. And we have forgotten God. The need now is for selflessness, for a spirit of sacrifice, for a willingness to put aside personal gains for the salvation of the whole Western world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn