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

More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.
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The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
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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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Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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How do you know that nonsense isn't a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.
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The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
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It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.
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Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin