Yevgeny Zamyatin We Quotes

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

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.

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative...

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.

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?

knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith

We comes from God, I from the Devil.

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

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

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.

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

The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.

The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.

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...

A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd be no point in reading...

Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you're right, it's a child's question, just as it should be.

Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

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?

But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North")

Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .

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.

You don't look normal, dear. You look sick. Because sick and not normal are the same thing. You're destroying yourself, and no one is going to tell you that - no one.

Everyone has to go mad, it's essential fir everyone to go mad - as soon as possible! It's essential - I know.

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.

Then how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.

She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me — and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this 'must'. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying.

You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.

The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

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.

Listen." I tugged at my neighbor. "Just listen to me! You must-you must give me an answer: out there, where your finite universe ends! What is out there, beyond it?

We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")

You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.

I stopped and listened. But all I could hear was.. a kind of thudding, and not in me but somewhere near me... my heart.

My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.

And what is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn't got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others;

Who knows who you are... A person is a novel: you don't know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end...

Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me-slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.

Колебанията са звук. Треперенето трябва да звучи. Защо не се чува?

I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now — like a knife-slit — they are here, still dripping sweet blood.

Yesterday, there was a Tzar and there were slaves. Today, there is no Tzar, but the slaves are still here. Tomorrow there will be only Tzars. We walk forward in the name of the free man of tomorrow, the Tzar of tomorrow. We have gone through the epoch when the masses were oppressed. We are now going through the epoch when the individual is oppressed in the name of the masses.

Oh, to the deuce with knowledge. Your much-heralded knowledge is but a form of cowardice. It is a fact! Yes, you want to encircle the infinite with a wall, and you fear to cast a glance behind the wall.

But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being – in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life – is happier than us?

In the ancient world, this was understood by the Christians, our only (if very imperfect) predecessors: Humility is a virtue, pride a vice; We comes from God, I from the Devil.

The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.

...And what if you don't wait? You just drive over the edge yourself? Wouldn't that be the only right thing to do, the one that would solve everything?

And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.

I never knew it before but now I know—and you, too, know—that laughter may be of different colors, Laughter is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo of a holiday—red, blue, and golden fireworks—or at times it may represent pieces of human flesh exploded into the air.…

Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo... No, that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy...?

They say there are flowers that bloom only once every hundred years. Why shouldn't there be some that bloom only once every thousand, every ten thousand years? Maybe we just haven't heard about them up to now because this very day is that once-in-a-thousand-years.

During the first firing a dozen or so numbers from the dock neglected to get out of the way - nothing remained of them except some crumbs and soot.

And that was when I learned from my own experience that a laugh can be a terrifying weapon. With a laugh you can kill even murder itself.

أليس واضحًا أن الهناء والحسد هما البسط والمقام للكسر الذي يُسمى السعادة؟

Shutting my eyes, I dreamed in formulas.

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

I felt I hadn't breathed since early morning, that my heart had not beat-and only now for the first time I took a breath, only now the floodgates in my chest opened...

—I told you, we must cut out imagination. In everyone...Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do!

Ai biết được...Người ta cũng giống như một cuốn tiểu thuyết: chưa đến trang cuối thì chưa biết kết cục sẽ ra sao. Bằng không thì đâu đáng để đọc...

The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.

My heart was light, quick, like an aero, and carrying, carrying me upward. I knew: tomorrow held some sort of joy. But what would it be?

Forget that you’re a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.

He plashed away, like paddles on water, toward the door, and every step he made returned to me gradually my feet, my hands, my fingers. My soul again spread equally throughout my body. I was able to breathe.

O-90 sat over the notebook, her head leaning toward her left shoulder, and making such an effort that her tongue was pushing her left cheek out. She looked like such a child, so charming. And so I felt good all over, clear, simple...

Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?

Their mistake was the mistake of Galileo. He was right that the earth revolves around the sun, but he didn't know that the entire solar system revolves around yet another center; he didn't know that the real orbit of the earth, as opposed to the relative orbit, is by no means some naive circle...

If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words.

Bir nokta, her şeyden daha fazla bilinmeyen içerir. Tüm yapması gereken kıpırdaması, azıcık yerinden oynamasıdır; binlerce değişik eğriye, yüzlerce katı biçime dönüşebilir. Kıpırdamak istemiyorum... Korkuyorum. Neye dönüşeceğim?

But the sky! The sky is blue. Its limpidness is not marred by a single cloud. (How primitive was the taste of the ancients, since their poets were always inspired by these senseless, formless, stupidly rushing accumulations of vapor!)

Now... what I feel these in my brain is just like... some kind of foreign body... like having a very thin little eyelash in your eye. You feel generally okay, but that eye with the last in it-you can't get it off your mind for a second.

Sizler, tanımadığım okurlarım, sizler bize oranla muhtemelen çocuksunuz (sonuçta bizim arkamızda TekDevlet var ve haliyle insan için en mümkün en yüksek doruklara erdik). Ve tıpkı çocuklar gibi, acı şeyleri ancak tatlı ve kalın bir macerayla kaplayıp verirsem yutacaksınız.

But why is it that within me "I don't want to" and "I want to" stand side by side? That is the chief horror of the matter; I continue to long for that happy death of yesterday. The horror of it is that even now, when I have integrated the logical function, when it becomes evident that that function contains death hidden within it, still I long for it with my lips, my arms, my heart, with every millimeter....

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?' ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

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.

Why? But why don't we have feathers? Or Wings? Nothing but the shoulder blades where wings would be attached? Why, because we no longer need wings. We've got aeros. Wings would only be in the way. Wings are for flying, but we have nowhere to fly to, we've already flown there, we've found it.

when man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom. And now, just as we have gotten rid of it (on the cosmic scale, centuries are, of course, no more than "just"), some wretched halfwits...

that ancient legend about paradise ... Why, it's about us, about today. Yes! Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains.

Dicen que hay unas flores que sólo se abren y florecen cada cien años. Y ¿por qué no han de haber otras que florezcan una vez cada mil e incluso cada diez mil años? Quizá no lo hayamos sabido por la simple razón de que este «una vez cada mil años» acontece precisamente hoy.

Freedom and crime are so indissolubly connected to each other, like... well, like the movement of the aero and its velocity. When the velocity of the aero = 0, it doesn't move; when the freedom of a person = 0, he doesn't commit crime. This is clear. The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom.

Ime te bolesti je: Mašta. To je -- crv, koji grize crne bore na čelu. To je groznica koja vas tjera da trčite sve dalje -- iako to 'dalje' počinje tamo gdje završava sreća. To je -- posljednja barikada na putu prema sreći. Radujte se: ona je već raznesena. Put je slobodan.

In the widely open cup of the armchair was I-330. I, on the floor, embracing her limbs, my head on her lap. We were silent. Everything was silent. Only the pulse was audible. Like a crystal I was dissolving in her, in I-330. I felt most distinctly how the polished facets which limited me in space were slowly thawing, melting away. I was dissolving in her lap, in her, and I became at once smaller and larger, and larger, unembraceable. For she was not she but the whole universe. For a second I and that armchair near the bed, transfixed with joy, we were one.

Tomorrow is the day of the yearly election of the Well-Doer. Tomorrow we shall again hand over to our Well-Doer the keys to the impregnable fortress of our happiness. Certainly this in no way resembles the disorderly, unorganized election days of the ancients, on which (it seems so funny!) they did not even know in advance the result of the election. To build a state on some non-discountable contingencies, to build blindly—what could be more nonsensical? Yet centuries had to pass before this was understood!

For one second I stared at her like all the others as something that had dropped out of nowhere: She was no longer a number, she was simply a person; she existed as nothing more than the metaphysical substance of the insult committed against OneState. But then some one of her movements-turning, she twisted her hips to the left-and all at once I knew: I know her, I know that body resilient as a ship-my eyes, my lips, my hands know it-in one moment I was absolutely sure of it.

N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' (“A Provincial Tale”)

The phono-lecturer began the description of the recently invented musicometer. “… By merely rotating this handle anyone is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust.

So here I am in step with everyone now, and yet I'm still separate from everyone. I am still trembling all over from the agitation I endured, like a bridge after an ancient train has rumbled over it. 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?

Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power. So take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side "I" and on the other "We," OneState. It's clear, isn't it? - to assert that "I" have certain "rights" with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you're a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.

Do you believe that you will die? Yes man is mortal I am a man ergo... no that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I am asking is, have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind but with your body? Actually felt that one the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be icy and yellow? No, of course you don't believe it. Which is the reason why up until now you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement.

But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancientes had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and i'm certain that i'm not mistaken if i say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects.

Strange- the barometer is falling, but there's no wind yet, just silence. Up there above, where we can't hear it, it's already begun, the storm. The rainclouds are racing along at full speed. There aren't many of them yet- scattered serrated fragments. It's as though some city had fallen up there and now the pieces of the walls and towers are flying down, the heaps of them grow with horrible rapidity before your eyes, and they come closer and closer, but still have days to fly through blue emptiness before they crash down here to the bottom, with us.

No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).

I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick class the square root of minus one-infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of the minus sign... But maybe that is nothing except my "soul," like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, which would deliberately sting itself with everything that...

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating - a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that'll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist. Well, of course, it's clear that you can't establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe," if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death...

I've come to read and hear many unlikely things about the times when people lived in freedom, i.e., the unorganized savage state. But the most unlikely thing, it seems to me, is this: how could the olden day governmental power - primitive though it was - have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them? Various historians even say that, apparently, in those times, light burned in the streets all night long, and all night long, people rode and walked the streets. This I just cannot comprehend in any way. Their faculties of reason may not have been developed, but they must have understood more broadly that living like that amounted to mass murder - literally - only it was committed slowly, day after day. The State (humaneness) forbade killing to death any one person but didn't forbid the half-killing of millions. To kill a man, that is, to decrease the sum of a human life span by fifty years - this was criminal. But decreasing the sum of many humans' lives by fifty million years - this was not criminal. Isn't that funny?