Quotes from Yevgeny Zamyatin

All their Immanuel Kants together couldn't do it! It didn't enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.

In order to establish the true value of a function, one must take it to its limits. And it's clear that yesterday's ridiculous "dissolution into the universe," taken to its limits, is death. Because death is exactly that: the ultimate dissolution of my self into the universe. And hence, if "L" signifies love and "D" signifies death, then L=f(D) - that is, love is a function of death.

The multiplication table is more wise and more absolute than the ancient god, for the multiplication table never (do you understand—never) makes mistakes! There are no more fortunate and happy people than those who live according to the correct, eternal laws of the multiplication table. No hesitation! No errors! There is but one truth, and there is but one path to it; and that truth is: four, and that path is: two times two.

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

Get the paper quick, maybe it's there... I read the paper with my eyes (that's not mistake: My eyes are like a pen now, or a calculator, something you hold in your hands, something you feel is not you- a tool).

But this is not your fault—you are sick. The name of this sickness is IMAGINATION.  It is a worm that gnaws out black lines on the forehead. It is a fever that drives you to escape ever farther, even if this "farther" begins where happiness ends.

Ime te bolesti je: Mašta. To je -- crv, koji grize crne bore na ?elu. To je groznica koja vas tjera da tr?ite sve dalje -- iako to 'dalje' po?inje tamo gdje završava sre?a. To je -- posljednja barikada na putu prema sre?i. Radujte se: ona je ve? raznesena. Put je slobodan.

But still, how could they write whole libraries about someone like Kant and hardly even notice Taylor-that prophet who could see ten centuries ahead?

It just goes against nature for a thinking and seeing being to live among these irregularities and unknown X's. It is as if someone blindfolds you and then makes you walk around like that and you feel your way around, stumbling, and you know that there is an edge somewhere very nearby and that it would only that one step for the only thing left of you to be a flattened, mangled piece of meat. Isn't that just about the same thing I'm going through?

We must all go insane—as soon as possible go insane.

Ora o conhecimento de si, o reconhecimento da própria individualidade só o têm o olho onde acaba de cair um cisco, o dedo esfolado, o dente dolorido. Quando sãos, o olho, o dedo, o dente não têm existência alguma. Não prova isto claramente que a consciência de si é de facto uma doença?

What's going on? A soul? Did you say, a soul? What the hell! Next thing you know we'll have cholera again. What did I tell you? [He tossed the thin one on his horns.] I told you so... we should operate on all of them, on the imagination. Extirpate the imagination. Surgery's the only answer... nothing but surgery...

One loves only the things one cannot conquer.

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit. The bearings are overheating: a minute longer and the metal will melt and start dripping and that will be the end of everything. I need a splash of cold water, logic; I pour it on in buckets but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist

The auditorium: an enormous half-globe of glass with the sun piercing through. The circular rows of noble, globe-like, closely shaven heads. With joy in my heart I looked around. I believe I was looking in the hope of seeing the rose-colored scythe, the dear lips of O- somewhere among the blue waves of the unifs. Then I saw extraordinarily white, sharp teeth like the … But no! Tonight at twenty-one o'clock O- was to come to me; therefore my desire to see her was quite natural.

Dicen que hay flores que sólo despuntan una vez cada cien años. ¿Y por qué no hay otras que florezcan cada mil o cada diez mil años? Tal vez hasta ahora no lo hayamos sabido por la sencilla razón de que esa vez-cada-mil-años toca precisamente hoy.

If [modern artists] hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved.

Mai inainte n-am stiut - acum stiu, dupa cum stiti si voi: rasul poate avea culori diferite. Nu este decat ecoul indepartat al exploziei din interiorul vostru: poate sunt rachete de sarbatoare - rosii, albastre, aurii, poate au sarit in sus franturi de trup omenesc...

I had never known this before, but now I do and so do you: Laughter comes in different colours. It is only the distant echo of an explosion inside you. It might come in holiday colours—red, blue, golden rockets. or it might be the bits of a human body flying out...

With his head thrust forward like a ram, Baryba pushed his way through to the front. For some reason this was necessary, he felt with all his guts that it was necessary. He clenched his iron jaws. Something bestial stirred in him, something he hungered for, some murderous instinct. To be with everybody, to howl like everybody, to hit the one that everybody else was hitting. ("A Provincial Tale")

And tomorrow... what? Nobody knows. You understand? Neither I nor anyone else knows. It's unknown. You understand it's come to an end, everything that was known? Now it'll be new, never before seen or imagined.

Înseamn? c? o iubeÈ™ti. Èši-e team? pentru c? e mai presus de tine, ur??ti pentru c? te temi, iubeÈ™ti pentru c? nu poÈ›i s-o spui. Pentru c? poÈ›i iubi numai ceea ce nu È›i se supune.

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?

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