Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that true knowledge, when held with certainty, parallels the concept of faith.
In this quote, Yevgeny Zamyatin explores the relationship between knowledge and faith. He implies that when knowledge is viewed as infallible and certain, it transforms into a kind of faith, highlighting the similarities between absolute belief in facts and the trust placed in spiritual or philosophical principles. This reflection invites consideration of how humans engage with what they perceive as truth and the faith that underlies that certainty.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of belief, someone might quote Zamyatin to illustrate how knowledge can become a belief system.
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. (βA Story About The Most Important Thingβ)
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.
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
The true identity theft is not financial. It's not in cyberspace. It's spiritual. It's been taken.
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them. The walls of London may be battered, but the spirit of the Londoner stands resolute and undismayed.
In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I'm against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They're ecologically unsustainable. And they're hugely undemocratic.
I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.
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