Romain Rolland citations

Page 2

“La vérité, c'est de chercher toujours la vérité.”

“L'art doit supprimer la violence, et seul il peut le faire. Sa mission est de faire régner le royaume de Dieu, c'est-à-dire de l'Amour.”

“Pouvres moutons! Si nous n`avions à nous défendre que du loup, nous saurions bien nous en garder. Mais qui nous gardera du berger?”

“Celui qu'on aime a tout droit contre vous, même de ne plus vous aimer.”

“L'art n'est pas une vile pâture, livrée aux vils passants. Une jouissance, certes, et de toutes la plus enivrante. Mais elle n'est le prix que d'une lutte acharnée, et son laurier couronne la victoire de la force. L'art est la vie domptée.”

“L'ennemi mortel de l'âme, c'est l'usure des jours.”

“Le théâtre doit être une lumière pour l'intelligence.”

“Un héros, c'est celui qui fait ce qu'il peut.”

“Créer, c'est tuer la mort.”

“La plus belle théorie n'a de prix que par les œuvres où elle s'accomplit.”

“Ce n'est pas la paix que je cherche, c'est la vie.”

“In politics, he has always been a republican with advanced Socialist sympathies, and internationalist at heart, and, as they said in the eighteenth century, a "citizen of the world." He has always fought social injustice. In art, he loves, above all, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Goethe… Rembrandt is the painter dearest to him. But his chosen country is Italy.”

“It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.”

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

“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.”

“Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all others, and if need be against all others.”

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

“The continual endeavor of man should be to lessen the sum of suffering and cruelty: that is the first duty of humanity.”

“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.”

“I, too, shall wake again.”

“I know at last what distinguishes man from animals; financial worries.”

“In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center….”