Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Page 3

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Last updated on April 19, 2025.
There also exists another alliance - at first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists. This alliance is not new. ... We observe continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West of the Soviet Communist leaders.
To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.
It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation. — © Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation.
Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
Your friend will argue with you.
We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it.
And keep as few things as possible, so that you don't have to fear for them. Give them up without a struggle-because otherwise the humiliation will poison your heart. They will take them away from you in a fight, and trying to hold onto your property will only leave you with a bloodied mouth ... But by owning things and trembling about their fate aren't you forfeiting the rare opportunity of observing and understanding?
If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?
Happiness doesn't depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them.
Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.
The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.
I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.
I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer. — © Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.
He who knows how to be content will be content with little.
Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.
I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul...
One cannot declare that only his faith is correct and all other faiths are not. God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. One must not have any negative attitude to any religion but nonetheless the depth of understanding God and the depth of applying God's commandments is different in different religions.
Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.
Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.
You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting.
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!
When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should.
Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.
The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe
Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".
The "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.
With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end.
An engineer cannot participate in irrationality. — © Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
An engineer cannot participate in irrationality.
Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Society must cease to look upon 'progress' as something desirable. 'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy', but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.
I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.
Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.
... any country that is not careful can be seized.
Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.
Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
I insist on believing that beauty elevates human beings.
A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country
It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.
A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult. — © Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.
I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.
When you're young, you haven't the experience, when you're old you haven't the strength.
Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.
It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them. Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!
... the inexorable lesson of centuries: suffering must be borne; there is no way out.
In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.
One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.
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