Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

One of the categories of people I don't like much are intellectuals. People say, 'Oh, you're an intellectual,' and I say, 'No!' What is an intellectual? An intellectual is somebody who thinks ideas are more important than people.

... common sense is very rare.

The inquiry, knowledge, and belief of truth is the sovereign good of human nature.

Intelligence divorced from judgment produces nothing but foolishness.

The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

To think truly is noble and to be deceived is base.

I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned!

Learning gives creativity Creativity leads to thinking Thinking provides knowledge Knowledge makes you great.

Unless one can think wisely it is better to remain a dummy.

A wise man first thinks and then speaks and a fool speaks first and then thinks.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Life with Fools consists in Drinking; with the wise Man, living's Thinking.

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit." "Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

That's your responsibility as a person, as a human being - to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.

The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.