One must seek another certitude beyond the world, beyond the homeland; one must refuse to join the chorus of the demoniacal and create one’s own homeland, one’s own world, outside the present time.
No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready...
Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.
Neque turpis mors forti viro potest accedere. Para las almas fuertes no hay muerte ignominiosa.
Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was xenophobia; morbid dislike of the foreig...
Madness, he exclaimed to himself, in astonishment, faltering. Madness! What do they want? Once again, once again! War once again, war that had so recently shattered his whole life? With a strange shud...
Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die.
La plus volontaire mort c’est la plus belle.
Karşı çıkmamın nedeni, orada yine tanıdık insanlarla bir arada olmak, yine nezaketen bazı şeyler yapmak ve sosyal davranmak zorunda kalmaktı. Oysa benim kendi başıma kalmaktan başka bir isteğim yoktu,...
It’s just opposition that rejuvenates. Had I remained a senator, it would have been too easy for me; I would long since have become intellectually lazy and inconsistent. Nothing harms a thinking man m...
It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.
In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain t...
In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.
I do not subscribe to this communal error of judging a man according to the way I perceive things.
I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader...
How to safeguard the deepest region of my spirit and its matter which belongs to me alone, my body, my health, my thoughts, my feelings, from the danger of being sacrificed to the deranged prejudices...
How to escape the tyrannical demands that the state and Church seek to impose on me? How to protect that unique part of my soul against enforced submission to rules and measures dictated from outside?
Hermitage
Few men on earth have ever fought with such faithfulness and tenacity to preserve their most intimate selves, their essences, from all impurities, from all toxins left by the rank spume of an epoch’s...
Come talvolta un artista, per dar prova delle proprie energie creative, cerca di proposito un soggetto esteriormente modesto invece di uno patetico e universale, così di tanto in tanto il destino cerc...