Quotes from Romain Rolland

VeÅ¡la mu do srdce dveÃ…â"¢mi jeho o?í; veÅ¡la tam celi?ká a dveÃ…â"¢e se za ní zavÃ…â"¢ely.

Ach, bývají v životÄ› chvíle... ÄŒlovÄ›k se stydí, že je ?lovÄ›kem...

O young men that shed your blood with so generous a joy for the starving earth! O heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by a common ideal, making enemies of those who should be brothers; all of you, marching to your death, are dear to me.

Let us be bold and proclaim the truth to the elders of these young men, to their moral guides, to their religious and secular leaders, to the Churches, the great thinkers, the leaders of socialism; these living riches, these treasures of heroism you held in your hands; for what are you squandering them? What ideal have you held up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves? Their mutual slaughter!

Man cultivates the vices which are profitable to him, but feels the necessity of legitimizing them; being unwilling to sacrifice them, he must idealize them.

Give an intellectual any ideal and any evil passion and he will always succeed in harmonizing the twain.

Wrong or right, he would never again for anything in the world have recourse to a priest. He admitted that these men were his superiors in intelligence or by reason of their sacred calling; but in argument there is neither superiority, nor inferiority, nor title, nor age, nor name; nothing is of worth but truth, before which all men are equal.

it must be admitted that on neither side have they brought honor to the cause of reason, which they have not been able to protect against the winds of violence and folly.

But did he then love God, or was it only the music, as an impudent priest said to him one day in jest, without thinking of the unhappiness which his quip might cause in him? Anybody else would not have paid any attention to it, and would not have changed his mode of living--(so many people put up with not knowing what they think!) But Christophe was cursed with an awkward need for sincerity, which filled him with scruples at every turn. And when scruples came to him they possessed him forever.

The true man of culture is not he who makes of himself and his ideal the center of the universe, but who looking around him sees, as in the sky the stream of the Milky Way, thousands of little flames which flow with his own; and who seeks neither to absorb them nor to impose upon them his own course, but to give himself the religious persuasion of their value and of the common source of the fire by which all alike are fed.

When Christophe at last made up his mind to go to bed, chilled in body and soul, he heard the window below him shut. And, as he lay, he thought sadly that it is cruel for the poor to dwell on the past, for they have no right to have a past, like the rich: they have no home, no corner of the earth wherein to house their memories: their joys, their sorrows, all their days, are scattered in the wind.

Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day.

If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.

Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.

To understand everything is to hate nothing.

One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

Everything is music for the born musician.

I distrust official charity.All charity should be done by stealth.

stones are hard everywhere.

Let us seek truth everywhere; let us cull it wherever we can find its blossom or its SEED. Having Found the seed, let us scatter it to the winds of heaven. Where ever it may blow, it will germinate. There is no lack in this wide universe of souls that will form the new ground.

Most men die at twenty or thirty; thereafter they are only reflections of themselves: for the rest of their lives they are aping themselves, repeating from day to day more and more mechanically and affectedly what they said and did and thought and loved when they were alive.