“Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow.”
"Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Context: Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers; the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers.
Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis.
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Yevgeny Zamyatin 34
Russian author 1884–1937Related quotes
“A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”
From a letter written in 1911
Usually cited as Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever. http://web.archive.org/web/20060421175318/http://www.uranos.eu.org/biogr/ciolke.html
“I am in yesterday, today. And tomorrow? In tomorrow I was.”
Estoy en el ayer, en el hoy. ¿Y en mañana? En el mañana estuve.
Voces (1943)
Source: Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It (1993), p. 128
“In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.”
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/lkbak10.txt (1888), Ch. 9.
Darwiniana: the Origin of Species (1860) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8thdr10.txt
1860s
Context: It is true that if philosophers have suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science...
“Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday.”
Source: The Lost Thing
