Art Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The world is kept alive only by heretics.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolutionary,…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?"…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?'…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“If [modern artists] hadn’t lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

To the feudal aristocracy and the aristocracy of the spirit, nobility derives from diametrically opposite sources. The glory of the feudal aristocrat…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

In adopting the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its intellectual value, and brought into it elements of social…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers,…

— 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…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Every artist of importance creates his own world, with its own laws - creates and shapes it in his own shape and…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow… But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine,…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin