Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn > Quotes

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power--he's free again.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

“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.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that 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. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“It's a universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truily profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. ”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Education doesn't make you smarter.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“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.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: "Beauty will save the world". What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes - but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition - and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force - they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky's remark, "Beauty will save the world", was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture

“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Freedom! To fill people's mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right of peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books I-IV

“This it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being? ”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“...you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of everything. For a person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power. He's free all over again.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“We didn't love freedom enough. ”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books V-VII

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Live not by lies!”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice. ”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Violence can only be concealed by a Lie, & the Lie can only be maintained by Violence. ... Any man, who has once proclaimed Violence as his Method, is inevitably forced to take the Lie as his Principle”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.
-Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Unknown Book 9351035

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands.

Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis­placements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience,
can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and
millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer­sault from one state into another.

We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappily
dragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets of
our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,
rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given
a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene­trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is
where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away
from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num­ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these
fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And
all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four
white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none­theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap,
ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to
our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

That's all there is to it! You are arrested!

And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike
bleat: "Me? What for?"

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which
shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into
omnipotent actuality.

That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day
will you be able to grasp anything else.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books I-IV

“At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest. ”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956