Sandor Quotes

To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we're killing are our protectors. ~ Sandor Katz

Since that day when he had kissed her in the house on Avenue Elisée Reclus, he hadn't been able to get the sensation of touching her skin out of his head. ~ Florencia Bonelli

It's the moment when something happens not just deep among the trees but also in the dark interior of the human heart, for the heart, too, has its night and its wild surges, as strong an instinct for the hunt as a wolf or a stag. The human night is filled with the crouching forms of dreams, desires, vanities, self-interest, mad love, envy, and the thirst for revenge, as the desert night conceals the puma, the hawk and the jackal. ~ Sandor Marai

There are times I almost believe that anything possible to be done should be done, not just because it's good or makes sense, simply because it's possible. ~ Sandor Marai

There isno feeling sadder or more hopeless than the coolingof a friendship between two men. Between a man anda woman a delicate web of terms and conditions is always negotiated. Between men, on the other hand, the deep sense of friendship rests on its selflessness: we expect no sacrifices, no tenderness from each other, all we want is to preserve a pact wordlessly made between us. Perhaps I was really the guilty one, because I did not know you well ~ Sandor Marai

Resistence takes place on many planes. Occasionally it can be dramatic and public, but most of the decisions we are faced with are mundane and private. What to eat is a choice that we make several times a day, if we are lucky. The cumulative choices we make about food have profound implications. Food offers us many opportunities to resist the culture of mass marketing and commodification. Though consumer action can take many creative and powerful forms, we do not have to be reduced to the role of consumers selecting from seductive convenience items. We can merge appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as cocreators. (Page 27) ~ Sandor Ellix Katz

That is our fate... One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy. ~ Sandor Marai

There is this question of otherness….So just as it is blood alone that binds people to defend one another in the face of danger, on the spiritual plane one person will struggle to help another only if this person is not 'different', and if, quite aside from opinions and convictions, they share similar natures at the deepest level. ~ Sandor Marai

No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence. ~ Sandor Marai

You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work. ~ Sandor Marai

There are worse things than suffering and death ... it is worse to lose one's self-respect. ~ Sandor Marai

Tomorrow, everyone who is beautiful will come under suspicion. As will those with talent and those with character." His voice was hoarse. "Don't you understand? To be called beautiful will be an insult; talent will be called a provocation, and character an outrage. Because it's their turn now, and they will appear everywhere, from everywhere, emerging in their hundreds of millions and more. Everywhere. The ugly ones, the talentless, those without any character. And they'll throw vitriol in the face of beauty. They will tar and slander talent. They will stab through the heart anyone with character. They're here already ... And there'll be more of them. Be careful! ~ Sandor Marai

I have no idea where to take a girl on a date. Sandor cuts short a laugh. We sit in silence, both of us pondering. ~ Pittacus Lore

Life becomes bearable only when one comes to terms with who one is, both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of the world. ~ Sandor Marai

Youth always yearns for that terrifying, suspect, indifferent homeland known as the world. ~ Sandor Marai

I'm honest. It's the world that's awful - Sandor Clegane, The Hound. ASOIAF ~ George R R Martin

Just as if I was one of those true knights you love so well, yes. What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it's all taking favours from ladies and looking fine in gold plate? Knights are for killing ... I killed my first man at twelve. I've lost count of how many I've killed since then. High lords with old names, fat rich men dressed in velvet, knights puffed up like bladders with their honours, yes, and women and children too - they're all meat, and I'm the butcher. Let them have their lands and their gods and their gold. Let them have their sers.' Sandor Clegane spat at her feet to show what he thought of that. 'So long as I have this,' he said, lifting the sword from her throat, 'there's no man on earth I need fear. ~ George R R Martin

All he said was, "I believe in you, Sophie Foster," as he raised his pathfinder up to the silvery glow of the moonlight.
And Sandor added, "We all do. ~ Shannon Messenger

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable. ~ Sandor Marai

And I've been waiting for you, because I couldn't do anything else. And we've both known that we would meet again, and then it would be all over with life and everything that gave our existence meaning and tension. A secret of the kind that lurks between the two of us has extraordinary power. It burns through the fabric of life like a scorching beam, and yet at the same time it also gives it tensile strength. It forces us to live. ~ Sandor Marai

I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe. ~ Sandor Marai

Goethe (I don't know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: "Man must experience his own destiny" - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a "personal destiny;" there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category. ~ Sandor Marai

I don't want another bodyguard. I want you. ~ Shannon Messenger

Wild foods, microbial cultures included, possess a great, unmediated life force, which can help us adapt to shifting conditions and lower our susceptibility to disease. These microorganisms are everywhere, and the techniques for fermenting with them are simple and flexible. ~ Sandor Katz

The family is a vast project, so enormous and important, both for us personally and for the world at large, that it's worth putting up with all the incomprehensible cares of life, all that superfluous pain, for its sake. ~ Sandor Marai

You can even make facts lie. ~ Sandor Marai

I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is to take the givens of one's fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can. That is the most we can accomplish. ~ Sandor Marai

The world spares only those who remain modest and humble - and even then only for an interval, no more. ~ Sandor Marai

Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food -- plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi -- and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively. ~ Sandor Ellix Katz

Sandor Boatly had never guessed that, properly played, baseball consisted of mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy, ballet, and carnival, all intertwined like the mystical ribbons of color in a rainbow. ~ W.P. Kinsella

Vienna wasn't just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one's soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life. I was poor, but I was not alone, because I had a friend. And Vienna was like another friend. When it rained in the tropics, I always heard the voice of Vienna. And at other times too. Sometimes deep in the virgin forests I smelled the musty smell of the entrance hall in Hietzing. Music and everything I loved was in the stones of Vienna, and in people's glances and their behavior, the way pure feelings are part of one's very heart. You know when the feelings stop hurting. Vienna in winter and spring. The allés in Schönbrunn. The blue light in the dormitory at the academy, the great white stairwell with the baroque statue. Morning ridings in the Prater. The mildew in the riding school. I remember all of it exactly, and I wanted to see it again... ~ Sandor Marai

We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly. ~ Sandor Marai

I don't like such "great questions" - my view is that life consists of a million little questions and that it is always only the totality of those that really matters. ~ Sandor Marai

Perhaps I was really the guilty one, because I did not know you well enough. I accepted that you did not reveal yourself completely to me, I admired your intelligence and your strange, bitter pride, I wanted to believe that you would forgive me as other people did because of this happy capacity I had to circulate in the world and to be welcomed, while you were only tolerated ~ Sandor Marai

One can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers. ~ Sandor Marai

Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it. ~ Sandor Marai

We reject certain food because it is rotten. Certain food we can see is fresh. But there is this creative space between fresh food and rotten food where most of human culture's most prized delicacies and culinary achievements exist. ~ Sandor Katz

Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal. ~ Sandor Marai

But like every kiss, this one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language. ~ Sandor Marai

I'll go out of my to make their job impossible."

"No, you won't," Sandor told her. "Youre much too smart to resort to such reckless behavior."

Sophie's eyebrows shot up. "You sure about that? You've seen how much time I spend with Keefe. ~ Shannon Messenger

Because it's not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand our fate, we become almost calm. Calm and extraordinarily, terrifyingly lonely. ~ Sandor Marai

What once made our hearts burn until we thought we would either die or kill someone ... all that is less than the dust the wind blows across the graveyards.
When we demand fidelity are we wishing for the other person's happiness? ... And if we dont love the person in a way that makes her happy, do we have the right to expect fidelity or any other?! ~ Sandor Marai

Friendship is no ideal state of mind; it is a law, and a strict one, on which the entire legal systems of great cultures were built. It reaches beyond personal desires and self-regard in men's hearts, its grip is greater than that of sexual desire, and it is proof against disappointment because it asks for nothing. ~ Sandor Marai

Do you also believe that what gives our lives their meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives? And that if we have experienced this much, then perhaps we haven't lived in vain? Is passion so deep and terrible and magnificent and inhuman? Is it indeed about desiring any one person, or is it about desiring desire itself? That is the question. Or perhaps, is it indeed about desiring a particular person, a single, mysterious other, once and for always, no matter whether that person is good or bad, and the intensity of our feelings bears no relation to that individual's qualities or behavior? ~ Sandor Marai

Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship? ~ Sandor Marai

Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one's priorities; one's sentimental and psychological values go out the window. ~ Sandor Marai

Our perfection lies in our imperfection. ~ Sandor Ellix Katz

[U]nder even the most sincere human declarations there remained unarticulated layers of despair, fury, lies, and ignorance. ~ Sandor Marai

You see what I mean? Being rich must be a condition, much like sickness or health. Say you are rich, you might, in some mysterious way, be rich forever, but however much money you have, you never feel properly rich. Maybe you need to believe in your wealth in order to be properly rich - I mean, the way saints and revolutionaries believe they are different. And you can't afford to feel guilty if you are rich: if you felt guilty for a second you'd be finished. The not-truly-rich, those who have visions of the poor while indulging in a beefsteak and drinking Champagne, will eventually lose out, because they are insincere in their wealth. They're not rich out of conviction, they are only pretending, cowardly, sneakily, to be rich. You have to be very disciplined to be rich. You can perform a few charitable acts, but only as a kind of a fig leaf. ~ Sandor Marai

You're like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren't you? A pretty little talking bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite. ~ George R R Martin

Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent. ~ Sandor Marai

Time is a purgatory that has cleansed all fury from my memories. ~ Sandor Marai

Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised. One can only dominate another human soul if one knows, understands, and with the utmost tact despises the person one is subjugating. ~ Sandor Marai

I was surrounded by trust and affection. No one could ask more of life, it is the greatest blessing of all. ~ Sandor Marai

Sin is not just what the catechism says it is. Sin is not simply that which we commit. Sin is also what we desire but are too weak to do. ~ Sandor Marai

It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter. No one is strong enough or cunning enough to avert by word or deed the misfortune that is rooted in the iron laws of his character and his life. ~ Sandor Marai

There's a feeling of shame that is more painful than any other in life; it's the shame felt by the victim who is forced to look his killer in the eyes, as if he were the creature bowing before its creator. ~ Sandor Marai

I've played four characters now, my latest one being Sandor the gypsy. ~ Thayer David

The deep secret at the core of art, in the artist himself, was the embodying of an instinct for play. ~ Sandor Marai