Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.

The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.

The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction.

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

A wise man travels to discover himself.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?

Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

I was trying to figure out where my intellect, if I really have one, where it fit. And so I was searching. I really didn't know who I was or what I really wanted to be, and in that search, like I think you do as an actor, you end up trying to define whatever that is, and I sort of said, "Oh well, searching spiritually in a way is interesting, and Eastern religion seems to be about a search."

I'm like everyone else in this stupid, bloody, amazing world. I'm flawed. Impossibly so. But hopeful. I'm still me.

All about a human being is, it's a great big hoping machine.

If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.

Don’t let a day go by without asking who you are…each time you let a new ingredient to enter your awareness.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark.

To penetrate one's being, one must go armed to the teeth.

It is not a question of observation which propels mankind forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is an instance of aggrandized reflection that insinuates the human psyche to the inhuman.

Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development - to call for and expect much from men and women, and not to be disappointed and embittered if they fall short - to try to do good with people rather than to them - this is my religion on its human side. And if God exists, I think that he must be in the warm sun, in the kindly actions of the people we know and read of, in the beautiful things of art and nature, and in the closeness of friendships.

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.