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“Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“So in our own poor hides and from our miserable comrades we learn the nature of satiety. Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“...you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of everything. For a person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power. He's free all over again.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Relations between a man and a woman are always strange: nothing can be foreseen, they have no predictable direction, no law. Sometimes you come to a dead end, where there is nothing to do but sit down and weep; all the words have been said, and to no purpose; all the arguments have been thought of, and shattered. But then sometimes, at a chance look or word, the wall doesn't start to crack, but simply melts away. And where there was nothing but darkness, a clear path appears again, where two people can walk.

Just a path �� perhaps only for a minute.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“[He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people.
But by one's inner self.
Everyone forges his inner self year after year.
One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being.
And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“... skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“In the realm of the unknown, difficulties must be viewed as a hidden treasure! Usually, the more difficult, the better. It's not as valuable if your difficulties stem from your own inner struggle. But when difficulties arise out of increasing objective resistance, that's marvelous!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.

Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.

A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.

But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“I had a chance to read Monte Christo in prison once, too, but not to the end. I observed that while Dumas tries to create a feeling of horror, he portrays the Château d'If as a rather benevolent prison. Not to mention his missing such nice details as the carrying of the latrine bucket from the cell daily, about which Dumas with the ignorance of a free person says nothing. You can figure out why Dantès could escape. For years no one searched the cell, whereas cells are supposed to be searched every week. So the tunnel was not discovered. And then they never changed the guard detail, whereas experience tells us that guards should be changed every two hours so one can check on the other. At the Château d'If they didn't enter the cells and look around for days at a time. They didn't even have any peepholes, so d'If wasn't a prison at all, it was a seaside resort. They even left a metal bowl in the cell, with which Dantès could dig through the floor. Then, finally, they trustingly sewed a dead man up in a bag without burning his flesh with a red-hot iron in the morgue and without running him through with a bayonet at the guardhouse. Dumas ought to have tightened up his premises instead of darkening the atmosphere.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“That's why there's a devil—to judge the priests.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Finally, he gave up trying to quiet her and lit a cigarette, the last resort of a man who finds himself in an intolerably stupid position.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Ông nên hiểu điều này, và ông nên nói lại điều này với những người trong bọn ông rằng các ông ch�� mạnh khi nào các ông không tước đoạt của người khác hết tất c�� mọi th��. Bởi vì khi một người đã b�� các ông lấy mất hết tất c��, người đó s�� không còn ngán s�� các ông nữa. Người đó lại tr�� thành t�� do.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“A human being," Kondrasev continued, "possesses from his birth a certain essence, the nucleus, as it were, of the human being. His 'I'. And it's still uncertain which forms which: whether life forms the man or man, with his strong spirit, forms his life! Because" - Kondrashev-Ivanov suddenly lowered his voice and leaned toward Nerzhin, who was again sitting on the block - "because he has something to measure himself against, something he can look to. Because he has in him an image of perfection which in rare moments suddenly emerges before his spiritual gaze.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Freedom begins with respect for others' rights.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Wherever they went—Moscow, Tehran, the Syrian coast, Switzerland—a furnished house, villa, or apartment awaited the young couple. And their philosophies of life were the same: "We have only one life!" So take everything life can give, except one thing: the birth of a child. For a child is an idol who sucks dry the juices of your being without any return for your sacrifices, not even ordinary gratitude.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle