Ilya Ehrenburg Quotes & Sayings

Every master knows that the material teaches the artist. — Ilya Ehrenburg

The epithet "monolithic" is often used as a term of praise in this country; but a monolith is a mass of stone. Human beings are far more complex. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Life seemed too calm; people looked for unhappiness in art as one might look for a raw material in short supply. — Ilya Ehrenburg

In peaceful times in a peaceful country a man grows up, goes to school, marries, works, suffers illnesses, grows old. He may go through the whole of life without understanding what freedom is. No doubt he always feels free to the extent to which it is proper for a respectable citizen with average powers of imagination to be free. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army. — Ilya Ehrenburg

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Everyone was searching for something, conducting lively arguments, getting excited, but behind it all one felt weariness, disillusion, emptiness. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Today, far continents have become suburbs. Even the moon has somehow come closer. But for all that, the past has not lost its power, and if within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times--almost as often as his suits--still he does not change his heart: he has but one. — Ilya Ehrenburg

I can't listen to music often. It plays on my nerves; it makes me want to say silly, tender things and stroke the heads of people who, living in a dirty hell, can yet create such beauty. — Ilya Ehrenburg

It's as much a writer's concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him. — Ilya Ehrenburg

There is no progress in art. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man's breadth, with his heart. — Ilya Ehrenburg

It is difficult to uproot fully grown plants; they become diseased and often perish. In Russia now they practise winter transplanting: a tree is dug up while it is in a dormant condition. In spring it comes back to life in a new place. A good method, especially as a tree has no memory. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Unfortunately, young Russian artists are in a difficult position today. Painting, like all other arts, rests on a continuity of experience. More than anything, young painters and sculptors need to know the works of their immediate elders. Such a continuity does not exist here to a sufficient degree in the visual arts. — Ilya Ehrenburg

They say that sometimes a man cannot recognize himself in a looking-glass. It is even harder to recognize oneself in the clouded mirror of the past. — Ilya Ehrenburg

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others-not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems. — Ilya Ehrenburg

You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through. — Ilya Ehrenburg

A pity we hadn't had time to say all the things we wanted to each other. — Ilya Ehrenburg

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Memory retains some things and discards others. I remember every detail of some scenes from my childhood and adolescence, by no means the most important ones. I remember some people and have totally forgotten others. Memory is like the headlights of a car at night, which fall now on a tree, now on a hut, now on a man. People (usually writers) who tell the story of their lives as a continuous and detailed whole generally fill in the gaps with conjecture; it is hard to tell where genuine reminiscence ends and the novel begins. — Ilya Ehrenburg

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Music has a great advantage: without mentioning anything, it can say everything. — Ilya Ehrenburg

I left with a heavy heart and a still heavier suitcase--I had filled it with my favourite books. — Ilya Ehrenburg

Kill the Germans, wherever you find them! Every German is our moral enemy. Have no mercy on women, children, or the aged! Kill every German - wipe them out! — Ilya Ehrenburg