Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.

Civilizations do not give out, they give in. They come apart not in a flash but by the inch. In a society where anything goes, everything eventually will.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

The tyranny of relativism is the spiritual poverty of our time

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

I'm seduced by the arts in general. Arts is like the power of now.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we're a part.

Art is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.