Quote

And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Yevgeny Zamyatin
Age: 53 †
Born: 1884
Born: January 1
Died: 1937
Died: January 1
Author
Engineer
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin
Eugene Zamyatin
Mistake
Prejudice
Courses
Absolutes
Course
Absolute
Happiness
Sign
Minus
Desire
Clearly
Marked
Wells
Ridiculous
Torment
Well
Carry
Plus
Always
Divine
Desires

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Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
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Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
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Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive truth reassures, error disturbs.
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The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.
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What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.
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Only the rational and useful is beautiful.
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It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this once in a thousand years has come today.
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Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
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The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
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The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.
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What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they'd nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.
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The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
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Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.
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You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you you hate it because you are afraid of it you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.
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When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.
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We need writers who fear nothing. (Our Goal)
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We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.
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Explosions are not comfortable.
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What is it to you if I don't want others to want for me, if I want to want myself - if I want the impossible.
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