Quotes from Solzhenitsyn
Prepared by Dmitry Sirotkin
I present to you a selection of quotes from the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008).
This is one of the Russian Nobel laureates in literature, an anti-Soviet dissident who became a conservative populist .
Quotes are summarized by topic: life ethics, human manifestations, politics, power, democracy, imprisonment, Russian people, improving the world, happiness, relationships, life, love, God, difficulties, truth, Russia, death, people, violence, art, education .
About life ethics
He is a wise man who is satisfied with little.
If you don't know how to use a minute, you will waste an hour, a day, and your whole life.
Live with an even superiority over life - do not be afraid of troubles and do not yearn for happiness. All the same, after all, the bitter is not enough and the sweet is not complete. It’s enough for you if you don’t freeze and if thirst and hunger don’t tear your insides with their claws... If your spine isn’t broken, both legs walk, both arms bend, both eyes see and both ears hear – who else should you envy? Envy of others eats us up most of all.
And you can understand the taste of the sea - from one spoon!
Rub your eyes, wash your heart, and value above all those who love you and who are kind to you. Don't offend them, don't scold them. Do not part with any of them in a quarrel. After all, you don’t know, maybe this is your last act and this is how you will remain in their memory.
Don’t chase after the illusory – property, titles: it takes decades of nerves, but is confiscated overnight.
It’s just that people’s ideas about what is good and what is bad are upside down. Living in a five-story cage, with people knocking and walking above your head, and a radio on all sides, is considered good. And to live as a hardworking farmer in an adobe hut on the edge of the steppe is considered extreme failure.
About human manifestations
Pity is a humiliating feeling: it humiliates both the one who pities and the one who is pitied.
There is a high pleasure in fidelity. Maybe the highest. And even if they don’t know about your loyalty.
It happens that thoughts that are unconditional at night in half sleep turn out to be untenable in the light of the morning.
One great passion, once occupying our soul, cruelly replaces everything else. There is no place for two passions in us.
If a person is called an activist during his lifetime, and even a well-deserved one, then this is his end: fame, which already interferes with healing, just as clothes that are too lush interfere with movement.
No matter how much we laugh at miracles, while we are strong, healthy and prosperous, but if life is so wedged, so flattened that only a miracle can save us, we believe in this only, exceptional miracle!
Every common holiday is difficult for a lonely person. But it’s a women’s holiday that’s unbearable for a single woman whose years are running out!
Everyone always has a dozen good reasons why he is right, that he does not sacrifice himself.
A suicide is always bankrupt, it is always a person at a dead end, a person who has lost life and does not have the will to continue it.
About politics
We deserve our regime and our leaders, and it’s up to us to sort things out.
Political life is not at all the main form of human life; politics is not at all a desirable activity for the majority. The more extensive political life is in a country, the more spiritual life is lost. Politics should not absorb the spiritual strength and creative leisure of the people. In addition to rights, a person also needs to defend his soul, to free it for the life of the mind and feelings.
The genius of a politician is to extract success from the people's misfortune.
The source of the strength or weakness of society is the spiritual level of life, and only then - the level of industry. A market economy alone, and even universal abundance, cannot be the crown of humanity. The purity of social relations is more important than the level of abundance. To deny a village private property means to close it forever.
Removing responsibility from Yeltsin is a great shame. I believe that Yeltsin and about a hundred people from his entourage should stand trial.
By the way, quotes about politics
About power
Give people a certain power, and they will come to certain vices.
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Anyone who has once proclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.
If we do not want violent power over ourselves, everyone must curb himself. No constitutions, laws or votes by themselves will balance societies, because people tend to persistently pursue their interests. The majority, if they have the power to expand and grab, then do just that.
For a statesman there is no greater sin than cowardice.
All methods of election campaign require certain qualities from a person, but for state leadership - completely different ones, nothing in common with the first. It is rare for a person to have both.
About democracy
It is in our time that democracy has risen from a form of government to become, as it were, a universal principle of human existence, almost a cult.
To give everything to a vote by the majority means to establish its dictatorship over the minority and over dissenting opinions, which are precisely the most valuable for finding ways of development.
We are hungry for freedom, and it seems to us that we need unlimited freedom. But freedom needs to be limited, otherwise there will be no harmonious society. Just not limited in the way they squeeze us. To us, democracy seems like the never-setting sun. What is democracy? - pleasing the rude majority. Pleasing the majority means: alignment with mediocrity, alignment with the lowest level, cutting off the thinnest high stems.
About the conclusion
- Here, guys, the law is the taiga. But people live here too. In the camp, this is who is dying: who licks the bowls, who hopes at the medical unit, and who goes to knock on their godfather.
Who is the prisoner's main enemy? Another prisoner. If the prisoners didn't get into trouble with each other, the authorities wouldn't have any power over them.
In this country, every release must be followed by an arrest somewhere.
What does it take to be stronger than the investigator and this whole trap? We must enter prison without trembling for the warm life we left behind. You have to tell yourself at the threshold: life is over, a little early, but nothing can be done. I will never return to freedom. I am doomed to death... From today on, my body is a useless, alien body for me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain dear and important to me. And in front of such a prisoner, the investigation will tremble!
About the Russian people
Prisoners in German captivity learned that there is no nation in the world more despicable, more abandoned, more alien and unnecessary than the Russian.
They say: an entire people cannot be suppressed endlessly. Lie! Can! We see how our people have become devastated, gone wild, and have become indifferent not only to the fate of the country, not only to the fate of their neighbor, but even to their own fate and the fate of their children. Indifference, the body's last saving reaction, has become our defining feature. That is why the popularity of vodka is unprecedented even on a Russian scale.
The people have an undoubted right to power, but what the people want is not power (the thirst for it is characteristic of only two percent), but wants, first of all, a stable order.
About improving the world
Where to start fixing the world? From others? Or from yourself?
If only it were that simple! - that somewhere there are black people who are maliciously doing black things, and you just need to distinguish them from the rest and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil crosses the heart of every person. And who will destroy a piece of his heart?...
For all reforms, we take on worse ones - and here too. They only ruin the cause and discourage people from having the last faith in the promises of the authorities.
What is the most expensive thing in the world? It turns out: to realize that you are not participating in injustices. They are stronger than you, they were and will be, but let them not be through you.
Oh happiness
It is not the level of well-being that makes people happy, but the relationship of hearts and our point of view on our lives. Both are always in our power, which means a person is always happy if he wants it, and no one can stop him.
Satiety does not depend at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat! So is happiness, so is happiness, Levushka, it does not at all depend on the amount of external goods that we snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude towards them!
How do you know at what point on earth you will be happy and at which point you will be unhappy? Who can say that they know this about themselves?
By the way, quotes about happiness
About relationships
Do you know why horses live so long? They don't sort things out!
The more fragile a person is, the more dozens, even hundreds of coinciding circumstances are needed so that he can get closer to someone like himself. Each new match only slightly increases the intimacy. But one single discrepancy can immediately ruin everything.
When the eyes incessantly and incessantly look into each other, a completely new quality appears: you will see something that does not open when sliding quickly. The eyes seem to lose their protective colored shell, and the whole truth is splashed out without words, they cannot hold it.
About life
There are many smart things in the world, but few good ones.
There are two mysteries in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember; how I will die - I don’t know.
None of the people knows anything in advance. And the greatest misfortune can befall a person in the best place, and the greatest happiness can find him in the worst place.
After all, there are people for whom their whole lives are smooth and smooth, while for others everything is shredded. And they say that his fate depends on the person himself. Nothing from him.
By the way, quotes about life
About love
Jealousy is wounded pride. True love, deprived of an answer, does not become jealous, but dies and ossifies.
Nowadays we don’t consider love for animals a penny in people, and we even certainly laugh at affection for cats. But having first fallen out of love with animals, don’t we inevitably then fall out of love with people?
To have an unloved woman is the unfortunate lot of the poor in body and soul. And men brag about it as a “victory.”
By the way, quotes about love
About God
You are still there, Creator, in heaven. You endure for a long time, but you hit hard.
I willingly believe in God. But I don’t believe in heaven and hell. Why do you consider us fools and promise us heaven and hell?
And I prayed. When we feel bad, we are not ashamed of God. We are ashamed of Him when we feel good.
About difficulties
In general, it is difficult to consider who has it worse. This is even more difficult than competing with success. Everyone is more annoyed by their own troubles. I, for example, might conclude that I have lived a remarkably unfortunate life. But how do I know: maybe it was even cooler for you?
The hardest life is not for those who drown in the sea, dig in the ground or look for water in deserts. The hardest life is for the one who hits his head on the ceiling every day when leaving the house - it’s too low.
About truth
The truth instantly slips away as soon as the intensity of our gaze relaxes - and at the same time leaves us in the illusion that we continue to follow it. This leads to many disagreements.
If you often have to lie, then sooner or later you yourself will believe it.
About Russia
How to describe the entire Russian history in one phrase? A land of stifled opportunities.
Whether we are a great nation, we must prove not by the vastness of the territory, not by the number of ward nations, but by the greatness of our actions.
About death
Someday it’s not scary to die, it’s scary to die now.
Don’t be afraid of the bullet that whistles, if you hear it, it means it’s no longer hitting you. You won't hear the one bullet that will kill you.
About people
Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.
A person is given not only life once, but also a conscience.
By the way, quotes about people
About violence
Nothing in the world can be achieved through violence! Taking a sword, a knife, a rifle, we will quickly become equal to our executioners and rapists. And there will be no end...
A person who is not internally prepared for violence is always weaker than the rapist.
About art
Art is not what, but how.
Geniuses do not adjust their interpretation to the taste of tyrants!
By the way, quotes about art and quotes about creativity
About education
Education does not improve intelligence.
You won't know everything in the world. You'll die a fool anyway.
By the way, quotes about education
About miscellaneous
God crumbles the old month into stars.
The universe has as many centers as there are living beings in it.
Easy money - it doesn’t weigh anything, and you don’t have that feeling that you’ve earned it. The old people were right when they said: what you don’t pay extra for, you don’t report.
Work is like a stick, it has two ends: if you do it for people, it gives you quality; if you do it for your boss, it gives you show off.
An intellectual is one whose interests in the spiritual side of life are persistent and constant, not forced by external circumstances and even in spite of them. An intellectual is one whose thought is not imitative.
Executioners love to decorate themselves with legends.
Sport is the opiate of the people...Sporting spectacles, football and hockey make fools of us.
It’s a simple truth, but you have to suffer through it: it’s not the victories in wars that are blessed, but the defeats in them! Governments need victories, people need defeats. After victories you want more victories, after defeat you want freedom - and usually they achieve it. Nations need defeats, just as individuals need suffering and misfortune: they force them to deepen their inner life and rise spiritually.
I tell you: please interfere more in our internal affairs... We ask you: intervene!
America has long proven itself to be the most generous and generous country in the world.
Engineer?! I had to be brought up in an engineering environment, and I remember well the engineers of the twenties: this openly shining intellect, this free and inoffensive humor, this ease and breadth of thought, the ease of switching from one engineering field to another and, in general, from technology to society, to art.
The tree is Christmas, not New Year!
Solzhenitsyn became famous for his anti-Soviet works and speeches, as well as his experience in Stalin’s camps. During his life in the West, he evolved in the direction of traditional folk values and returned to current Russian life in 1990 with his programmatic article “How can we develop Russia?” Solzhenitsyn was politely listened to , but it was felt that the somewhat speculative ideas of the classic turned out to be inconsonant with the current situation in the country.
Quotes about Solzhenitsyn
- A. Varlamov: The fact that he was with us in the 20th century, the fact that he survived the most difficult, most tragic moments of history, it supported us, saved us, maybe we didn’t understand it ourselves.
- M. Sholokhov: At one time I had the impression about Solzhenitsyn that he was a mentally ill person suffering from delusions of grandeur. That he, Solzhenitsyn, having served time once, could not stand the difficult test and went crazy. I am not a psychiatrist and it is not my business to determine the degree of damage to Solzhenitsyn’s psyche. But if this is so, a person cannot be trusted with a pen: an evil madman who has lost control of his mind, obsessed with the tragic events of 1937 and subsequent years, will bring great danger to all readers and especially young ones. If Solzhenitsyn is mentally normal, then he is essentially an open and vicious anti-Soviet person. (see quotes from Sholokhov)
- K. Simonov: I am deeply outraged by Solzhenitsyn’s creativity and behavior. I completely agree with the speech of Pravda, I completely share all the points made in this article regarding Solzhenitsyn.
- Yu. Bondarev: A feeling of evil hostility, as if he was settling scores with an entire nation that had offended him, bubbles up in Solzhenitsyn like in a volcano. He suspects every Russian of unscrupulousness and inertia, adding to it the desire for an easy life and for power, and, as if in a delight of self-abasement, he furiously tears at his shirt, shouting that he himself could become an executioner.
- M. Gorbachev: His books - “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “The Gulag Archipelago” - these are the books that helped people see what this regime really meant. We should be grateful to Alexander Isaevich for his contribution to making our country free and democratic.
- A. Kalyagin: Solzhenitsyn was the personification of national power, the moral strength of the Russian people. I remember well what an “explosion” occurred in society after the release of his story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It was a real revelation that completely changed our consciousness. This was one of the main life lessons that changed us all.
- G. Pomerantz: When Solzhenitsyn’s article “How to Develop Russia” was published, I opened it, took two pencils and decided to highlight in red what I liked and in blue what I didn’t. The pages turned out to be very colorful. It seemed to me that the author of this article contradicts himself more than once. In his thought, from my point of view, it is difficult to see a coherent system for getting out of the dead end in which we find ourselves. For me, Solzhenitsyn is rather an interesting writer.
- A. Strelyany: Solzhenitsyn in his works (meaning “The Gulag Archipelago” and “The Red Wheel”) shows what the Soviet, red period of our history is, what happened on Russian soil in the twentieth century, who were the main characters of our tragedy where the people were, where the society was, where the state was. He tears off masks, highlights true goals and motivations, and debunks myths.
- I. Brodsky: Solzhenitsyn is a wonderful writer. And like every famous writer, he heard that such a writer should have his own style. What made it stand out in the 1960s and 70s? Not the language, but the plot of his works. But when he became a great writer, he realized that he must have his own literary style. He didn’t have one, and he set out to create it. I started using Dahl’s dictionary... (see quotes from Brodsky)
Next, you can move on to other collections of quotes:
- Shukshin quotes
- quotes from Astafiev
- Dovlatov quotes
- Vysotsky quotes
- Nabokov quotes
- quotes from Paustovsky
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Five years ago, on August 3, the great writer and thinker of our time passed away. His whole life is an endless struggle, a search for himself and his place in life. Today we present the most famous quotes from his works
TATYANA ALEXEEVA
Alexander Isaevich died on August 3, 2008, at the age of 90... As he dreamed, in his homeland. Solzhenitsyn lived a long life full of trials and searches. The authorities feared him like fire, the intelligentsia respected and sometimes envied him, his loved ones loved him selflessly. And Solzhenitsyn himself selflessly loved his country, constantly living in thoughts of his homeland, even when he was deprived of citizenship and expelled abroad. In 1994, after 20 years of wandering in a foreign land, he returned to Russia; for the last 14 years he has lived in Moscow or at a dacha near Moscow.
Alexander Isaevich left behind a rich literary heritage, much of what he wrote we have yet to comprehend. But everyone can learn for themselves such a simple and at the same time amazing truth. You can quote Solzhenitsyn endlessly; we have chosen for you 20 of his most famous expressions.
Solzhenitsyn (far left) graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University in 1941, and two years earlier also entered the correspondence department of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and Art.
"Cancer Ward"
Someday it’s not scary to die, it’s scary to die now.
Nowadays we don’t consider love for animals a penny in people, and we even certainly laugh at affection for cats. But having first fallen out of love with animals, don’t we inevitably then fall out of love with people?
If you don't know how to use a minute, you'll waste an hour, a day, and your whole life.
After all, there are people for whom their whole lives are smooth and smooth, while for others everything is shredded. And they say that his fate depends on the person himself. Nothing from him.
Every common holiday is difficult for a lonely person. But it’s a women’s holiday that’s unbearable for a single woman whose years are running out!
There is a high pleasure in fidelity. Maybe the highest. And even if they don’t know about your loyalty.
In general, it is difficult to consider who has it worse. This is even more difficult than competing with success. Everyone is more annoyed by their own troubles. I, for example, might conclude that I have lived a remarkably unfortunate life. But how do I know: maybe it was even cooler for you?
Pity is a humiliating feeling: it humiliates both the one who pities and the one who is pitied.
If a person is called an activist during his lifetime, and even a well-deserved one, then this is his end: fame, which already interferes with healing, just as clothes that are too lush interfere with movement.
"One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich"
Work is like a stick, it has two ends: if you do it for people, it gives you quality; if you do it for your boss, it gives you show off.
You are still there, Creator, in heaven. You endure for a long time, but you hit hard.
Alexander Isaevich gives lessons to his sons Ermolai, Ignat and Stepan. Vermont, USA. 1979
"In the first circle"
Do you know why horses live so long? They don't sort things out!
One great passion, once occupying our soul, cruelly replaces everything else. There is no place for two passions in us.
Satiety does not depend at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat! So is happiness, so is happiness, Levushka, it does not at all depend on the amount of external goods that we snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude towards them!
Where to start fixing the world? From others? Or from yourself?..
They say: an entire people cannot be suppressed endlessly. Lie! Can! We see how our people have become devastated, gone wild, and have become indifferent not only to the fate of the country, not only to the fate of their neighbor, but even to their own fate and the fate of their children. Indifference, the body's last saving reaction, has become our defining feature. That is why the popularity of vodka is unprecedented even on a Russian scale. This is terrible indifference when a person sees his life not chipped, not with a corner broken off, but so hopelessly fragmented, so spoiled along and across that only for the sake of alcoholic oblivion is it still worth living. Now, if vodka were banned, a revolution would immediately break out in our country.
What is the most expensive thing in the world? It turns out: to realize that you are not participating in injustices. They are stronger than you, they were and will be, but let them not be through you.
Don’t be afraid of the bullet that whistles, if you hear it, it means it’s no longer hitting you. You won't hear the only bullet that will kill you.
There are many smart things in the world, but few good ones
Sport is the opiate of the people...Sporting spectacles, football and hockey make fools of us.
2006, with his wife Natalya Dmitrievna.
"Matrenin's Dvor"
Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.
There are two mysteries in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember; how I will die - I don’t know.
"Gulag Archipelago"
It’s a simple truth, but you have to suffer through it: it’s not the victories in wars that are blessed, but the defeats in them! Governments need victories, people need defeats. After victories you want more victories, after defeat you want freedom - and usually they achieve it. Nations need defeats, just as individuals need suffering and misfortune: they force them to deepen their inner life and rise spiritually
Everyone always has a dozen neat reasons why he is right that he does not sacrifice himself.”
None of the people knows anything in advance. And the greatest misfortune can befall a person in the best place, and the greatest happiness can find him in the worst place.
And I prayed. When we feel bad, we are not ashamed of God. We are ashamed of Him when we feel good.
...Nothing in the world can be achieved through violence! Taking a sword, a knife, a rifle, we will quickly become equal to our executioners and rapists. And there will be no end...
A suicide is always bankrupt, it is always a person at a dead end, a person who has lost life and does not have the will to continue it.
Jealousy is wounded pride. True love, deprived of an answer, does not become jealous, but dies and ossifies.
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
