Quote

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

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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
Best
Prison
Shaping
Take
Guess
Freed
Even
Fate
Reproach
Made
Step
Bondage
Would
Steps
Prisoner
Submissiveness
Time
Worst
Recognition
Ennobled
Life
Impossible
Total
Abdication
Easy
Ahead
Calmer

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.
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A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.
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What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.
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To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.
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Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.
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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People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it's coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Voting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people's representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.
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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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
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The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit.Don't you feel that?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We have ourselves to save.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn