Great Throughts Treasury

"The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought."

"We are, all of us, molded and remolded by those whom we have loved. And though that love may pass, we remain nevertheless their work – a work which very likely they do not recognize and which is never exactly what they intend. No love, no friendship, will ever cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark upon it forever."

"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread. "

"No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever"

"Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses."

"Worshippers in spirit and truth are to be found in all confession and all churches, and they are recognizable by a sign, and they love one another, in a manner of speaking, not in spite of what separates them but in some way or other because of what separates them."

"The only work of which we are absolute masters and over which we can have sovereign power, the only one that we can dominate, encompass in a glance, and organize, concerns our own heart."

"Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell. "

"A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet."

"A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness."

"By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him."

"By the time dusk fell, he was back in his room. The last of the daylight lay like fine ashes on the roof-tops. He did not light his lamp, but sat by the fireplace in the dark, seeking in the far distance of his past some vague memory of a love-affair, some recollection of a friendship, with which to soften the hard tyranny of isolation."

"A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again."

"Death steals our loved ones. Instead, we keep them and we all immortalized in the memory. Life does that to us many times and definitely steals."

"How strange, in these early life we are given little happiness, not to warn us no voice: how many years you live, no'll have another joy to your life than these few hours. Enjoy as the sternum drop them because, after 'this, there is nothing for you. This first source I found is the last. Quench your thirst once and for all."

"I believe that only poetry counts... A great novelist is first of all a great poet."

"Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna."

"I love Germany so dearly that I hope there will always be two of them."

"Let us be wary of ready-made ideas about cowardice and courage: the same burden weighs infinitely more heavily on some shoulders than on others."

"I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted."

"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."

"Men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed-off wings where he never ventures."

"Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, like myself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. He is not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mold once and for all. This is what makes the traditional psychological novel so different from what I did or thought I was doing. The human being as I conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama of human salvation, even if he doesn’t know it."

"The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair."

"The day when you will not burn more love, many more will die of cold."

"The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling."

"Sin is the writer's element."

"The sin against nature [is] - compulsory celibacy"

"What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories."

"You approach easily a living soul, and through it the crime, and through the most distressing kinks - but stupidity is impenetrable."

"We know well only what we are deprived of."

"To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others."