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Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.
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
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Canonized
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More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
We have long become overgrown with calluses we no longer hear people being killed. (X)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring - thus he erred himself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine the knife is the universal means of solving all knots and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
And tomorrow--who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows--it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
