Romain Rolland Quotes

The greatest human ideal is the great cause of bringing together the thoughts of Europe and Asia; the great soul of India will topple our world.

Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love theirs.

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.

Most men are essentially dead by thirty.

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

Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.

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.

The more we create, the more we love and lose those whom we love, the more we escape from death. With every new work we round and finish, we escape into the work we have created, the soul we have loved, the soul that has left us. When all is told, Rome is not in Rome; the best of a man lies outside himself.

Thousands of animals (now billions) are butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. It cries vengeance upon all the human race.

Everyone, deep down within, carries a small cemetery of those he has loved.

Every man, every art, has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with little and many lies.

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.

There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people.

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

Mozart was able to do what he wished in music and he never wished to so what was beyond him.

The artist is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north.

Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepared the way for the faith of tomorrow.

A hero is a man who does what he can.

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

All these young millionaires were anarchists, of course: when a man possesses everything it is the supreme luxury for him to deny society: for in that way he can evade his responsibilities

If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay.

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.

When nothing hampers action, the soul has fewer reasons for action.

Let us return to our eagle's nest in the Himalayas. It is waiting for us, for it is ours, eaglets of Europe, we need not renounce any part of our real nature ... whence we formerly took our flight.

Take possession of the air, submit the elements, penetrate the last redoubts of nature, make space retreat, make death retreat.

History furnishes to politics all the arguments that it needs, for the chosen cause.

You want to be a hero. That is why you do such silly things.

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

A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose.

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.

To understand everything is to hate nothing.

The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe.

Each man must learn his own ideal and try to accomplish it: that is a surer way of progress than to take the ideas of another.

One day History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try to make ours light before her!

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

His (Swami Vivekananda) words are great music, phrases in the style of Beethoven, stirring rhythms like the march of Handel choruses. I cannot touch these sayings of his, scattered as they are through the pages of books, at thirty years' distance, without receiving a thrill through my body like an electric shock. And what shocks, what transports, must have been produced when in burning words they issued from the lips of the hero!

Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre ... A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle.

There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.

I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.

As a result of all his education, from everything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all.

The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.