It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that rare and extraordinary events may occur unexpectedly, and we might not recognize their significance until they happen.
In this quote, Yevgeny Zamyatin reflects on the idea of rarity and the potential for remarkable occurrences to happen at any moment in time. He implies that just because something is extraordinarily rare, like flowers that bloom only once in many years, does not mean it cannot occur in our lifetime. The essence of the message encourages us to be open to the extraordinary possibilities that life may offer and to appreciate the moments that may seem fleeting or rare.
In practice
During a graduation speech to inspire students to recognize unique opportunities in their future.
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.
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.
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
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”)
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.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
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.
You should not live one way in private, another in public.
My mother would write letters when I was away at camp and say, 'There's an Ann-shaped space around the house. Nobody fills an Ann-shaped space except an Ann.' I'm convinced we all have a God-shaped space in us, and until we fill that space with God, we'll never know what it is to be whole.
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