Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

Resist much, obey little.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

By surrendering my life to the revolution, I found eternal life

All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number? Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy).

Pride is when sinful human beings aspire to the status and position of God and refuse to acknowledge their dependence upon Him.

Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

There is nothing new about humanism. It is the yielding to Satan's first temptation of Adam and Eve: "Ye shall be as gods." (Gen. 3:5)

All great art comes from a sense of outrage.

The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

I don't trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

Every artist of importance creates his own world, with its own laws - creates and shapes it in his own shape and image, and no one else's. This is why it is difficult to fit the artist into a world that has already been created, a seven-day, fixed and solidified world: he will inevitably slip out of the set of laws and paragraphs, he will be a heretic.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.

The noblest calling in the world is motherhood. True motherhood is the most beautiful of all arts, the greatest of all professions. She who can paint a masterpiece, or who can write a book that will influence millions, deserve the plaudits and admiration of mankind; but she who rears successfully a family of healthy, beautiful sons and daughters whose immortal souls will exert influence throughout the ages long after paintings shall have faded, and books and statues shall have decayed or been destroyed, deserves the highest honor that man can give, and the choicest blessings of God.

A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.