Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
Yevgeny ZamyatinRead
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the knife as a symbol of human ingenuity and the complexity of decision-making.
In this quote, Yevgeny Zamyatin reflects on the knife as a powerful metaphor for human creativity and the duality of its uses. He describes the knife not only as a tool that can solve problems and create freedom through its various applications, but also as a representation of the complexities and paradoxes inherent in human existence, where courage is essential to navigating life's difficulties.
Themes
KnifeHuman IngenuityParadoxFearlessnessCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical discussion about human creativity.
More from Yevgeny Zamyatin
All quotes →The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
Yevgeny ZamyatinRead
The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)
Yevgeny ZamyatinRead
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Yevgeny ZamyatinRead
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Yevgeny ZamyatinRead
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
Yevgeny ZamyatinRead
Similar quotes
Abba Moses asked Abba Sylvanus, Can a person lay a new foundation every day? The old man replied, If you work hard, you can lay a new foundation every moment. Abba Pimen said, To throw yourself before God, not to measure your progress, to leave behind all self-will; these are the instruments for the work of the soul. The desire to rule is the mother of heresies.
Saint John ChrysostomRead
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Wendell BerryRead
To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.
Simone WeilRead
...Therefore it is said: 'The perception of a phenomenon IS the perception of the Universal Nature, since phenomena and Mind are one and the same.'
Huangbo XiyunRead
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.
Neil GaimanRead
To ask "Where in your brain is intelligence?" is like asking "Where is the voice in the radio?"
Howard GardnerRead