Quote

I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Leafs
Discoveries
Leaf
Philosophers
Philosopher
Discovery
Ancient
Find
Newest

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Image
Our envy of others devours us most of all.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
As the old proverb says: Well-fed horses don't rampage.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
We will die, but art will remain.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
The perception of the West as mostly a knight of democracy has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
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
Image
Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
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
Image
If so far we have been unable to see clearly or to reflect the eternal lineaments of truth, is it not because we too are still moving towards some end-because we are still alive?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
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