Romain Rolland Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

A hero is the one who does what he can. The others don't.

Romain Rolland
Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepared the way for the faith of tomorrow.

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

Romain Rolland
It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.

Romain Rolland
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.

Romain Rolland
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.

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

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

Romain Rolland
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.

Romain Rolland
The artist is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north.

Romain Rolland
A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose.

Romain Rolland
Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love theirs.

Romain Rolland
One day History will pass judgment on each of the nations at war; she will weigh their measure of errors, lies, and heinous follies. Let us try to make ours light before her!

Romain Rolland
Leave your theories. All theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, foolish, mischievous.

Romain Rolland
When nothing hampers action, the soul has fewer reasons for action.

Romain Rolland
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.

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

Romain Rolland
"Thou art come back to me, Thou art come back to me! O Thou, whom I had lost!... Why didst Thou abandon me?"
"To fulfil My task, that thou didst abandon."
"What task?"
"My fight."
"What need hast Thou to fight? Art Thou not master of all?"
"I am not the master."
"Art Thou not All that Is?"
"I am not all that is. I am Life fighting Nothingness. I am not Nothingness, I am the Fire which burns in the Night. I am not the Night. I am the eternal Light; I am not an eternal destiny soaring above the fight. I am free Will which struggles eternally. Struggle and burn with Me."

Romain Rolland
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.

Romain Rolland
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.

Romain Rolland
The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.

Romain Rolland
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

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

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

Romain Rolland
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....

Romain Rolland
"There are some dead who are more alive than the living."
"No, no! It would be more true to say that there are some who are more dead than the dead."
"Maybe. In any case there are old things which are still young."
"Then if they are still young we can find them for ourselves.... But I don't believe it. What has been good once never is good again."

Romain Rolland
It is not peace that I seek, but life.

Romain Rolland
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.

Romain Rolland
Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre.... A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle.

Romain Rolland
Never do I hesitate to look squarely at the unexpected face that every passing hour unveils to us, and to sacrifice the false images of it formed in advance, however dear they may be. In me, the love of life in general predominates over love of my own life (that, indeed, would never have sufficed to bear me up). May life herself speak! However inadequate I may be in listening to her, and in repeating her words, I shall try to record them, even if they contradict my most secret desires. In all that I write, may her will, not mine, be done!

Romain Rolland