Romain Rolland Quotes

همه‌چیز، خاطره‌ی گفت‌وگوها، بوسه‌ها، هم‌آغوشی پیکرهای دل‌داده، همه‌چیز می‌گذرد؛ ولی تماس ارواحی که یک‌دیگر را لمس کرده و در میان انبوه اشکال زودگذر یک‌دیگر را شناخته‌اند، هرگز زدوده نمی‌شود.

موسیقی دوست رازداری نیست: محرمانه‌ترین اندیشه های انسان را فاش می‌سازد

A hundred facts testify to how great an extent the East was mingled with Hellenic thought during the second century of our era.

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.

In the garden of harmonies, [Debussy] selects the most beautiful flowers.

The slaughter accomplished by man is so small a thing of itself in the carnage of the universe! The animals devour each other. The peaceful plants, the silent trees, are ferocious beasts one to another. The serenity of the forests is only a commonplace of easy rhetoric for the literary men who only know Nature through their books! ... In the forest hard by, a few yards away from the house, there were frightful struggles always toward. The murderous beeches flung themselves upon the pines with their lovely pinkish stems, hemmed in their slenderness with antique columns, and stifled them. They rushed down upon the oaks and smashed them, and made themselves crutches of them. The beeches were like Briareus with his hundred arms, ten trees in one tree! They dealt death all about them. And when, failing foes, they came together, they became entangled, piercing, cleaving, twining round each other like antediluvian monsters. Lower down, in the forest, the acacias had left the outskirts and plunged into the thick of it and, attacked the pinewoods, strangling and tearing up the roots of their foes, poisoning them with their secretions. It was a struggle to the death in which the victors at once took possession of the room and the spoils of the vanquished. Then the smaller monsters would finish the work of the great. Fungi, growing between the roots, would suck at the sick tree, and gradually empty it of its vitality. Black ants would grind exceeding small the rotting wood. Millions of invisible insects were gnawing, boring, reducing to dust what had once been life.... And the silence of the struggle! ... Oh! the peace of Nature, the tragic mask that covers the sorrowful and cruel face of Life!

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

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

هیچ چیز به اندازه عشقی که منظور معینی نداشته باشد فرساینده نیست.
نیروی شخص را می خورد و از میان می برد. سودای شناخته شده روح آدمی را سخت به خود مشغول می دارد؛ شخص از آن یه ستوه می آید؛ ولی دست کم می داند به خاطر چه. هر چیز تحمل پذیر است مگر احساس خلا...

God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night. But the night is limitless, and the Divine struggle will never cease: and none can know how it will end. It was a heroic symphony wherein the very discords clashed together and mingled and grew into a serene whole! Just as the beech-forest in silence furiously wages war, so Life carries war into the eternal peace.
The wars and the peace rang echoing through Christophe. He was like a shell wherein the ocean roars. Epic shouts passed, and trumpet calls, and tempestuous sounds borne upon sovereign rhythms. For in that sonorous soul everything took shape in sound. It sang of light. It sang of darkness, sang of life and death. It sang for those who were victorious in battle. It sang for himself who was conquered and laid low. It sang. All was song. It was nothing but song.

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.

What I especially love in Lefebvre is this intimate alliance — which for me makes the true man — of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will.

stones are hard everywhere.

I lay there turning over the pages of my life, thinking of what I had done and left undone, and of the dreams from which I had awakened. How far off seem the bright visions of early boyhood, and how poor and bare the reality looks. I thought of all my expectations, and the small results of my labors; of my wife, who certainly cannot be called either good-natured or good-looking, of my sons who hardly seem to belong to me, with whom I have nothing in common: — of the faithlessness and folly of those around us, of our poor France torn by civil wars and religious persecutions; of my works of art scattered, life itself a handful of ashes, soon to be blown away by the breath of the Destroyer. — I put my face close up against the oak tree, and lay there weeping quietly all among the big roots which cradled me like a father’s arms; and I felt that he listened.

کریستف دید که زندگی نبردی بی‌آشتی و بی‌امان است که در آن کسی که می‌خواهد مردی شود که شایسته‌ی این نام باشد باید پیوسته با لشکرهای دشمن نامرئی بجنگد: با نیروهای کشنده‌ی طبیعت، با آرزوهای آلوده، با اندیشه‌های تیره که انسان را خائنانه به جائی می‌کشانند که خود را پست و معدوم سازد.