242 Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

To kill one individual, that is, to subtract fifty years to the total sum of human lives, was criminal. But to subtract fifty million years was not considered criminal. Really, isn’t that absurd?

What is it that people beg for, dream about, torment themselves for, from the time they leave swaddling clothes? They want someone to tell them, once and for all, what happiness is – and then to bind them to that happiness with a chain.

To feel one’s self, to be conscious of one’s personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness? Apparently.

Shutting my eyes, I dreamed in formulas.

Homo sapiens is only man, in the fullest sense of the word, when his grammar contains no question marks, only exclamation marks, commas, and periods. And so today, at.

Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter – even murder itself.

One must remember that mathematics is like death, never makes mistakes, never plays tricks. If we are unable to see those irrational curves or solids, it only means that they inevitably possess a whole immense world somewhere beneath the surface of our life...

We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow – and judge today in the name of tomorrow.

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else’s.