Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Honest
Future
Past
Without
Acceptable
Analysis
More quotes by 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
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
Cracks make caves collapse.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
How quickly a zek (a prisoner) gets cheeky-or, putting it in literary language, how quickly a man's requirements grow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
