Quote

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

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
Never
Highest
Beast
Love
Happiness
Mutual
People
Happy
Affection
Place
Towards
Human
Achievement
Gnawing
Humans
Market
Idol
Feel
Direct
Prey
Feels
Beings
Aspire

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
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Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality.
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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?
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In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.
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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.
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The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We will die, but art will remain.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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How quickly a zek (a prisoner) gets cheeky-or, putting it in literary language, how quickly a man's requirements grow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It's not the sea that drowns you-it's the puddle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Morality is always higher than law and we cannot forget this ever.
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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I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Your friend will argue with you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn