Romain Rolland

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

The greatest human ideal is the great cause of bringing together the thoughts of Europe and Asia; the great soul of India will topple our world.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The more a man lives, the more a man creates, the more a man loves and loses those whom he loves, the more does he escape from death. With every new blow that we have to bear, with every new work that we round and finish, we escape from ourselves, we escape into the work we have created, the soul we have loved, the soul that has left us.

History furnishes to politics all the arguments that it needs, for the chosen cause.

There are some dead who are more alive than the living.