What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they'd nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that what we often dismiss as nonsense could hold significant value if properly nurtured and appreciated.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's quote challenges conventional thinking about intelligence and creativity, arguing that society has undervalued 'nonsense'—a term that can refer to imaginative, irrational, or unconventional ideas. By suggesting that if we had invested the same care into nurturing these 'nonsense' ideas as we do in intelligence, they might have developed into something profoundly valuable, the quote opens up discussions about the importance of creativity, imagination, and the potential merit of unconventional thoughts in advancing human understanding.
In practice
In a class about creativity, this quote could be used to encourage students to embrace unconventional ideas.
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.
Sentient beings, self and others, enemies and dear ones-all are made by thoughts. It is like seeing a rope and mistaking it for a snake. When we think that the rope is a snake, we are scared, but once we see that we are looking at a rope, our fear dissipates. We have been deluded by our thoughts. Likewise, mentally fabricating self and others, we generate attachment and aversion.
So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
I have a long-lasting gratitude and trust for what UNICEF does.
Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it's not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.
The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds - where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough - a modest living- and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.
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