Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

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.

Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.

Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.

I don't think George Bush is a good president by any imagination, but when he said, 'If you're talking to Al-Quaeda, we want to know what it's about,' it just proves one thing: If you're president long enough, you will one day say something that is true.

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for truth.

Photography is truth.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

He who thinks little errs much.

To avoid being drawn into error, keep a firm grip on the truth.

Remind thyself, in the darkest moments, that every failure is only a step toward success, every detection of what is false directs you toward what is true, every trial exhausts some tempting form of error, and every adversity will only hide, for a time, your path to peace and fulfillment.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Truth is simple, requiring neither study nor art.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

As Christians, we must see that just because an artist-even a great artist-portrays a worldview in writing or on canvas, it does not mean that we should automatically accept that worldview. Good art heightens the impact of that worldview, but it does not make it true.

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?

Logic is the art of making truth prevail.

Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.

The great enemy of knowledge is not error, but inertness. All that we want is discussion; and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be. One error conflicts with another, each destroys its opponent, and truth is evolved.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.

Logic is the art of convincing us some truth.