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Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Oak and the Calf (1975)

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Solzhenitsyn here seems to be paraphrasing Sophocles who expresses similar ideas at the end of Oedipus Rex. This is also a direct reference to Plutarch's line, "call no man fortunate until he is dead," from his "Parallel Lives".

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

The First Circle (1968)

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years.

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties.

Nobel lecture (1970)

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.