Quotes from Yevgeny Zamyatin

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.

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.

Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.

Explosions are not comfortable.

The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.

All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.

Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.

Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.

It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.

There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.

To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

All women are lips, nothing but lips.

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

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.

Only the rational and useful is beautiful.

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...

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.

I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom -- that is, in disorganized wildness.