Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Page 7

To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer.

But nothing is all black in nature.

... but food eaten quickly isn't food.

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

If someone asked you, why not help him out?

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.

A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.

A forest doesn't weep over one tree.

The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.

A horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire 20th century. The Church is just rising from its knees. Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution.

There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been discovered!

There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead; life to the living.

To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement?

... We brush aside all scales not our own, as if they were follies or delusions.

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it.

In military science there is a principle more important than "Forward": it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.

Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.

The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!

The task must be to banish from mankind's thought the idea that anybody has the right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual agreements.

When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.