Romain Rolland Men Quotations

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.

You are a vain fellow. You want to be a hero. That is why you do such silly things. A hero!... I don't quite know what that is: but, you see, I imagine that a hero is a man who does what he can. The others do not do it.

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.

There is no joy other than the joy of creating. There is no man who is truly alive other than one who is creating. All others are just shadows on the earth with nothing to do with being alive. The joy of living, whether it is love or action, is the joy of creating.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most men are essentially dead by thirty.