24 Quotes by Ilya Ehrenburg

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.

You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through.

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others-not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems.

There is no progress in art.

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man’s breadth, with his heart.

Unfortunately, young Russian artists are in a difficult position today. Painting, like all other arts, rests on a continuity of experience. More than anything, young painters and sculptors need to know the works of their immediate elders. Such a continuity does not exist here to a sufficient degree in the visual arts.

It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.