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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
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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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Knowledge
Really
Around
Doe
Cowardice
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Infinity
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Nothing
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More quotes by 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
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
At night numbers must sleep it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense.
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
The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of man's creations. The knife was a guillotine the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. (The North)
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
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow there is no final number.
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
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
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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
There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The moon ... is a mad woman holding up her dress So that her white belly shines. Haughty, Impregnable, Ridiculous, Silent and white as a debauched queen.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Only the rational and useful is beautiful.
Yevgeny Zamyatin