
Quote of Malevich, November 1916, in: 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting'
1910 - 1920
Zamyatin here references a statement in Latin created by the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov: a realibus ad realiora ["from the real to the more real" or “from reality toward a higher reality"]
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates. All realistic forms are projections along the fixed, plane coordinates of Euclid's world. These coordinates do not exist in nature. Nor does the finite, fixed world; this world is a convention, an abstraction, an unreality. And therefore Realism — be it "socialist" or "bourgeois" — is unreal. Far closer to reality is projection along speeding, curved surfaces — as in the new mathematics and the new art. Realism that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, non-objectivity. Only the camera lens is objective.
Quote of Malevich, November 1916, in: 'From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting'
1910 - 1920
“Primitive religions consisted mainly in the worship of the powers of nature.”
...the essential thing in religion was not morality, but the ceremonial method of placating the god, securing his gifts, and ascertaining his wishes. He might even be pleased best by immoral actions, by the immolation of human victims, by the sacrifice of woman's chastity, or by the burning of the first born.
Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 4
Quote of Malevich, cited in Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 452
1910 - 1920
“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
Source: A Bend in the River
Le Mystère Laïc (1928); later published in Collected Works Vol. 10 (1950)
“The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.”
As quoted by Robert Anton Wilson in Maybe Logic - The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson (2003)
From 1980s onwards
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available.
The Fourth Dimension simply Explained. (New York, 1910), p. 58. Reported in Moritz (1914); Also cited in: Howard Eves (2012), Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics, p. 167
OKK 1760 (Nice, January 1892); as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 81
1880 - 1895
“Harry: All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”
Deconstructing Harry (1997)