Top 15 Romain Rolland Quotes

French author (1866-1944)

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Romain Rolland (29 January 1866 – 30 December 1944) was a French writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 after the publication of his major work, Jean-Christophe.

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Alternative Names: R.Rolland

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

If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.

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

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.

To understand everything is to hate nothing.

there is only one true heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it

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

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

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.

Everything is music for the born musician.

If there is one place on the face of 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!

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

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.

stones are hard everywhere.

...a hero is a man who does what he can. The others do not do it.