Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

102. “Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

103. “People who are at ease with their consciences always look happy.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

104. “The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

105. “If you live in a graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

106. “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

107. “The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

108. “It’s not the sea that drowns you-it’s the puddle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

109. “You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

110. “Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.” But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

111. “Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

112. “A forest doesn’t weep over one tree.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

113. “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

114. “Why should I trust you? We haven’t drunk from the same bowl of soup.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

115. “Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

116. “Every human act can be disguised with a coating of gilt.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

117. “A genius doesn’t adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant’s taste.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

118. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

119. “The thoughts of a prisoner – they’re not free either. They keep returning to the same things.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

120. “Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

121. “The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

122. “The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

123. “The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

124. “What a force is laughter.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

125. “There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been discovered!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

126. “As the fathers live, so the children play.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

127. “It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

128. “Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its subjects are free from all obligations to it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

129. “We have to condemn the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

130. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

131. “On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

132. “Mourn if you must, but don’t stop fighting.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

133. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

134. “We will die, but art will remain.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

135. “For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

137. “There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

138. “But nothing is all black in nature.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

139. “All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

140. “The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

141. “The secret is that when you’ve been pitched head first into hell you just write about it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

142. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

143. “We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

144. “The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

145. “Freedom begins with respect for others’ rights.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

146. “And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

147. “Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the lie. They are linked in the most intimate, most organic and profound fashion: violence cannot conceal itself behind anything except lies, and lies have nothing to maintain them save violence. Anyone who has once proclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

148. “Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

149. “A drop in the ocean has no fear of a hurricane.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

150. “To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn