Quotes by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.”

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.”

“How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides,...”

“They tell me, shaking their heads:"You should be kinder. You are somehow furious".I used to be kind. It didnt last long.”

“no one sleeps more beautifully than you. But i am afraid that you will waken just now, and touch me with an indifferent glance, lightly passing, and commit the murder of beauty.”

“Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.”

“Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.”

“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”

“Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.”

“Time has a way of demonstrating . . . the most stubborn are the most intelligent.”

“Envy is an insult to oneself.”

“A show of envy is an insult to oneself.”

“The hell with it. Who never knewthe price of happiness will not be happy.”

“So on and onwe walked without thinking of restpassing craters, passing fire,under the rocking sky of '41tottering crazy on its smoking columns.”

“Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!”

“Over Babiy Yarthere are no memorials.The steep hillside like a rough inscription.I am frightened.Today I am as old as the Jewish race.”

“No Jewish blood runs among my blood,but I am as bitterly and hardly hatedby every anti-semiteas if I were a Jew. By thisI am a Russian.”

“No people are uninteresting.Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.Nothing in them is not particular,and planet is dissimilar from planet.”

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.”

“I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life”