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

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

dreamer inspirational art

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.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

reading men people

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.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

naked philosophy children

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

errors mistake writing

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

Yevgeny Zamyatin

alternatives choices two

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

prejudice mistake desire

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

differences fear book

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

Yevgeny Zamyatin

entropy remedy bitterness

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

nonsense century good-things

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty". The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

strong inspirational art

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

literature inspirational art

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

errors essence truth

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

Yevgeny Zamyatin

things-in-life kind love

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

Yevgeny Zamyatin

essentials mind knows

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

philosophy way art

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.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

stronger hate

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

finals revolution infinite

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

make-you-think special thinking

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.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

emotional self art

Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number? Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

names inspirational art