Romain Rolland

“I would rather have this life of combat than the moral calm and mournful stupor of these last years. God give me struggle, enemies, howling crowds, all the combot of which I am capable.”

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

“Everything is music for the born musician.”

“Let us seek truth everywhere;let us cull it wherever we can find its blossomor 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 soulsthat will form the new ground.”

“Islands of memory begin to rise above the river of his life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight of the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new islands, touched to gold by the sun.”

“But perhaps there are in us forces other than mind and heart, other even than the senses - mysterious forces which take hold of us in the moments when the others are asleep; and perhaps it was such forces that Melchior had found in the depths of those pale eyes which had looked at him so timidly one evening when he had accosted the girl on the bank of the river, and had sat down beside her in the reeds - without knowing why - and had given her his hand.”

“Basta un instante para hacer un héroe, y una vida entera para hacer un hombre.”

“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.”

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

“To understand everything is to hate nothing.”

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

“Il faut savoir allier le pessimisme de l´intelligence à l´optimisme de la volonté.”

“the public will only stand genius in infintesimal doses,sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature...A fashionable genius!Doesn't that make you laugh?..what a waste of power!”

“A limited number of types,good and bad serve for all ages.”

“stones are hard everywhere.”

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

“راستی و یک رویی موهبتی است که به اندازه هوش و زیبایی نادر است، و بی انصافی است که انسان آن را از همه کس طلب کند.”

“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.”