Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

Consciousness is a disease.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

We use concepts like "consciousness"---"mind"---"personality," but we don't really know yet what these things are.' He was shaking his head. 'Not really. Not at all.

I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.

Life is but thought.

I can't turn off the way I think, and that's essentially who I am, who anybody is.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation.

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own

Man is but the place where I stand.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

If you're a human being walking the earth, you're weird, you're strange, you're psychologically challenged.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately... you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

I find myself a fascinating subject.

I'm used to hearing myself. My own voice.

Everyone has their own different life experiences which make them who they are. No two people's life experiences are the same. And mine are just unique to me.

Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

Our subjectivity is so completely our own.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.